Resurgence of the right
Comedy, laughter is, according to Plato, a form of scorn, reserved for the inferior. The inverse being pity. That said, I would assert that the younger one is, the more emotional, reactive, and less reasonable. Start out being nothing but extreme expressions of unmistakably pure emotions, and get more and more complex due to the insertion of subtly.
So that one doesn't sway the young particularly politically with evidence and argument, but with laughter and pity. These emotions, and displays tell us who has gone too far, and become ridiculous, and who is being unjustly treated. So that, an examination of the zeitgeist during pivotal developmental stages reveals precursor conditions for who will be shunned, and who will be elevated in the coming generation. I don't think entirely undeservedly.
Now, all that said, I think that social justice has gotten to the point of ridiculousness, so that, one can see the increasing mockery, and scorn of it. Emotions are complex things, and we indulge ourselves in them. They remind us of good experiences, ties, places we've been, people we've known, good times in our lives, or whatever. We relive those things by attempting to reproduce analogous emotional ranges. Meaning that not only are the teens going to be laughing at and mocking particular groups, and pitying others, but they will be experiencing high intense emotional experiences, that they will spend the rest of their lives attempting to reproduce, with the fetishes of the markers of those experiences. Even when the zietgeist shifts, they will continue to make the same jokes, and signal the same virtues. The memes just get danker.
The pendulum has swung far one way, will it swing equally far back the other way for a bit? This ought to also be taken as a warning away from being too extreme, as your extremeness is the fuel for the genesis of your antithesis.
So that one doesn't sway the young particularly politically with evidence and argument, but with laughter and pity. These emotions, and displays tell us who has gone too far, and become ridiculous, and who is being unjustly treated. So that, an examination of the zeitgeist during pivotal developmental stages reveals precursor conditions for who will be shunned, and who will be elevated in the coming generation. I don't think entirely undeservedly.
Now, all that said, I think that social justice has gotten to the point of ridiculousness, so that, one can see the increasing mockery, and scorn of it. Emotions are complex things, and we indulge ourselves in them. They remind us of good experiences, ties, places we've been, people we've known, good times in our lives, or whatever. We relive those things by attempting to reproduce analogous emotional ranges. Meaning that not only are the teens going to be laughing at and mocking particular groups, and pitying others, but they will be experiencing high intense emotional experiences, that they will spend the rest of their lives attempting to reproduce, with the fetishes of the markers of those experiences. Even when the zietgeist shifts, they will continue to make the same jokes, and signal the same virtues. The memes just get danker.
The pendulum has swung far one way, will it swing equally far back the other way for a bit? This ought to also be taken as a warning away from being too extreme, as your extremeness is the fuel for the genesis of your antithesis.
Comments (88)
Edit: also, do you mean danker or darker? You might mean danker, which would be interesting.
I only suggest this, because it seems to me that teens don't laugh about, and mock the same things as when I was a kid.
There is a movement based on the feeling that social justice is being forced down people's throats in an unnatural way that is something more than making sure everyone gets equal treatment. This could also be viewed as attempts to social engineer society from the top down.
To what extent that perception is real or a product of not wanting to give up one's privileged place in society is debatable (probably both to some extent). Also, humans have a natural tendency to want to rebel against being constantly being told not say or think certain ways, even if there is a good intention behind that. It can even be viewed as an Orwellian attempt to control society by redefining language to try and make the world more just.
An example might be:
Women and men are equal, and to ensure that society treats them that way, we must erase all forms of treating women differently from men. Which comes off as ridiculous and unnatural, since there are gender differences (although of course individuals differ across both genders). But to what extent this is just a sexist reaction and to what extent it's ideology gone to an extreme is the question (again some of both just depending). But I've definitely had people tell me that the only reason girls play with dolls and boys with toy guns is because of society, which I find profoundly silly, having been a child myself where the girls were plenty free to play with the boys (allowing for individual variance).
But one has to unpack "globalism" a bit: it's an ideological and political confluence of several factors, with three main strands:
1) modern liberalism as a quasi-religious cult that has aimed single-mindedly at the control of public opinion for nearly a century, the end result of a Gramscian "Long March Through the Institutions" (starting with academia, with the Frankfurt School in the 30s and 40s, moving through to media, government and mass entertainment in the 1950s, and again the influence of Cultural Marxism in the 1960s and onwards), and this would include Feminism from about the 1970s on;
2) the remnants of the Boomer "New Left" in both the US and Europe (themselves somewhat influenced by 1) in its 1960s iteration) finally come to major positions of power; and
3) major bank and big business interests (often using the rhetoric of the free market, but not overly-enamoured of the substance of the idea - they prefer big government).
The 2) people think of the nation state as the primary cause of war, the 3) crowd want Rome to have a single neck and love cheap labour, and the 1) crowd see the nation state and nationalist traditions as institutional obstacles to their vision of utopia.
The reaction is also somewhat complex, comprised of:
1) old school nationalists, including both ethnic and civic nationalists (American conservatives would belong to the latter group),
2) a formerly Left-leaning, but latterly disenfranchised, disaffected working class, despised by the "elites", etc., etc. (this has been canvassed fairly well by mainstream analysts in response to the Trump phenomenon),
3) younger cohorts who have been raised by 1)-type globalist indoctrination, but are rejecting it and looking for alternatives (and this group may actually include a fair number who formerly thought of themselves as on the Left). This is the internet-savvy group; also the group that's doing a lot of the mockery you're talking about.
Nationalism will win for the foreseeable future, because globalism (or rather, the kind of globalism we've had up till now) is fundamentally incoherent and insane, while nationalism is actually coherent and sane: the relatively ethnically-homogenous nation state remains the largest viable political unit.
Something like Kantian globalism (or what one might call "Star Trek globalism") will undoubtedly triumph in the end, but it can only really come about by an organic process of rapprochement between genuinely diverse nation states, not by a forced, top-down process of homogenization under a global totalitarian regime, which is what's been attempted over the past half-century or so.
This I find most interesting. Just because, it was upon talking to someone else about their kids, and how they are surprisingly political, more so than we are, and surprisingly right leaning, in the sense of a rebellion against all of the diversity, and inclusion stuff, and what not. None of them had any actual person they're following that I know of, or group they claim to belong to, but just all of the internet mockery that they were right into. Constantly joking about it, with their punctuation of "R.I.P.".
I find that surprising, and don't remember people being all that political when I was a kid. So it got me to thinking about this, and realizing the increasing amount I'm hearing about it from a number of angles, but the effects particularly on the teenagers around me is surprising, which is what drew me to these conclusions.
"Social justice" as in "social justice warriors" (saw) is not the same thing as "Justice". Much of the sjw kerfuffles we witness are outrage exercises directed at the small potatoes of cultural forms. Real Justice concerns very large and substantive issues such as distribution of wealth, destruction of community assets, pollution, crime against persons, etc.
It isn't that social justice warriors are unjust; their efforts are misdirected.
As far as your title goes, "the resurgence of the right"... "right" and "left" wax and wane on the basis of movements in the population at large. Big political movement change is generally driven by major events. For instance, economic depressions and booms, recessions and recoveries, war (especially unpopular wars, all have a large effect on the way people "feel" about their lives, society, politics, government, etc. Propaganda leverages itself on real events and drives movements further than they might otherwise go.
Indeed, I think that there is a natural wax and wane around an equilibrium.
I think that there is a natural proclivity for institutions to quickly become about their own survival and growth. They always go too far, because they don't do enough, and then all celebrate and disband. They keep on their track until they are forcibly derailed.
Yeah, there have been some analysts who reckon Gen Z is more Right-leaning than any generation since WWII. On the other hand I've seen other analysts saying the opposite. I think the truth is probably inbetween. There's still a lot of hangover from the school/academic/media/entertainment indoctrination of the past 40 years or so in Gen X-ers and Millennials, so probably also in the young generation now growing up, but I think there is probably some shift in the weighting.
A fair number of Millennials are shaking off the trance currently just as a result of thinking things through and revising the received wisdom, while on the other hand there are probably still many Gen Z kids who are, or more likely pretend to be, ideological zombies (most likely, the "teacher's pet" types who are laser focussed on career and know how to make the right noises to get ahead with the culture as it currently is).
But there have certainly been a few documented amusing incidents of classes of quite young kids trolling their SJW teachers hard. That could be indicative of a larger trend, or it could just be accidental lumpiness.
At any rate, to some degree, younger generations are bound to be somewhat irreverent to the sacred cows of the establishment, whatever the establishment is. If the situation does fold over to the Right being in power for a few decades (which I think is likely), the irreverence will eventually go the other way again. (This is because there's always a lot of hypocrisy among adults wrt their kowtowing to establishment norms just to get on in life, and kids can smell it - for kids, IOW, it's more the result of an emotional reading of adults than an intellectually considered thing.)
Yes, quite right, on all points. Well put as well. Also happy to hear that there are at least some suggestions that this is the case, and I am noticing something.
I ended the OP with the suggestion that one's extremeness fuels the creation of the antithesis, so that balance, and temperance are very important qualities. To act too extremely, even when one is positive of their rightness is counter-productive to their aims. Could even make worse the thing they wish to diminish.
What you say here may be true, but we could provide some concrete examples of this process happening.
We create "institutions" like Congress, United Way, the Church (whatever denomination), the Metropolitan Sewer Board, Universities, General Electric, libraries, etc. with the intent that they will and should perpetuate themselves. Persistent institutions are one of the ways we maintain continuity in culture (for better and for worse).
Here's an example: MN AIDS Project was founded in 1983 to somehow deal with the then-new disease among gay men. It grew rapidly, did very good work, had successes and failures like most organizations. By 2003 it was no longer very connected to the gay male community (which had itself changed over the years), it had found stable funding, it was thoroughly professionalized, (no longer fueled by volunteers). It was "an institution". It began looking for new problems to deal with, to continue its existence, rather than just admitting that it had done what it could and would throw in the towel. AIDS and HIV haven't disappeared, of course, but the problem of 2018 requires a newly founded group to deal with the much different circumstances (like HIV now being more common in young black men than in gay white men).
Many organizations have followed the same path. They begin with an urgent problem and committed people, work on that problem for a while, reach a stage of routinization, become entrenched, and go about surviving because they exist.
I've proposed that non-profits should come with a sundown clause: After 25 years, they come to an end, disband, liquidate, and disappear. New non-profits tend to do their best work during the first 10 years.*** IF the problem that the nonprofit originally addressed is still around (it often will be) then it is time for new people to start a fresh project to address that problem--for a limited period of time.
On the other hand, institutions like the Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation et al, set themselves up to exist for a long time, for better or for worse, and tend to stick with their initial goals (which might or might not be good).
***No proof, of course. This is just my impression after working in nonprofits for 40 years.
Yes, I think that we agree, I just lacked specificity in my suggestion. I was speaking more to institutions that develop to address contemporary social problems, or goals. I fully agree that not all institutions are characterized in this way, but rather are designed to meet continuing needs, with no specific vision of conclusion, or accomplishment in sight.
I appreciate your first person account, and agree that it would be a great idea to have a "sundown clause". If the institution has a specific vision of completion, then they should have a time frame within which they can accomplish this, or be replaced with something fresh.
While the rest of the post didn't do that much for me so I almost didn't comment, your concluding summary seems to about nail it.
Thank you, I appreciate your thinking so.
I’m not a fan of the current POTUS. But the self-righteous mocking and mostly cringe-inducing unfunniness coming from comedians and talk-show hosts smacks of piling on and bandwagon jumping. Combined with the President’s tweeting and other bizarre behavior, the whole affair is more immature than middle school. Totally self-serving all around. Robert Bly’s The Sibling Society years ago warned that there were few adults left in the public sphere. Now there seems to be none. At least none with much of a platform or audience.
It's the birth of philosophy, or rather, what reigns supreme contemporaneously is sophistry, but philosophy wins the game over time, historically. Performance over substance.
I'm not a huge fan of comedy, I'm not a fun person, I think that laughter is a form of hysteria, or when a particular emotion is surrendered to. I like the idea that the ancient gods are faculties, or as Jung said, they all went inside to form psychology. So that, we worship gods, in the sense of what we surrender to emotionally, and allow to be the moving force behind our actions. Rather than a complete rejection of one over the other, I prefer the notion of an emotional caste structure, much like it was when the gods were external, and even then, Zeus, intellect, was king.
I'm not endorsing it, but just noticing it. Not being an unbiased observer as well, I have in fact become upset, and attempted to set limits to it, as well as reminded them that jokes become reality with time.
Just wanted to add: the fundamental problem with the Left at the moment is that having had cultural hegemony for so long, they've forgotten the basic principle of civil discourse: the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism, the capacity to reflect on the possibility that for all one's certainty and moral conviction about one's analysis of the situation, one may yet be wrong, and the other fellow right.
When one forgets that, one starts to pre-judge everything that comes out of one's interlocutor's mouth, one ceases to listen, one ceases to learn. The Right has certainly been guilty of that in that past, in times when it was ascendant; now it's very much the Left's turn at making this fundamental error.
And that's why the Left is becoming a laughing stock. It's a kind of intellectual slapstick, the intellectual and moral equivalent of stepping on a rake.
I do agree. I think that one important aspect to wanting to persuade others to our positions is that it increases our own certainty of it, so that when most are on your side, you're all the more certain of it. This is precisely reflected in the way you describe, I think.
No, young people who want to see social justice are, on the whole, not ridiculous. They may sometimes be over-zealous and mistarget and get things wrong, but their orientation is spot on, and most of them are miles ahead intellectually of their detractors on the right. That it's become fashionable in right-wing circles to attack so-called SJWs and that that's gained some currency in the general population (in the US at least) is of no importance in the greater scheme of things. It's mostly a tool to make the right feel better about themselves. To criticize satire is even worse in my view. Political satire is essential to a healthy democracy and the right wing are more a target of comedians simply because they provide more fodder for them. Because many of their representatives (with plenty of exceptions but a much higher percentage at least than on the left, and certainly many more than before in the era of Trump) are markedly ignorant and intellectually backward and that should be highlighted. (I would be happy to demonstrate that with examples if necessary, but I think we all know it to be true)
Quoting gurugeorge
It's almost unbelievable in the era of Trump that you could unselfconciously come out with this statement. It's almost like you're satirizing yourself. Sure, there are actors on both sides guilty of a lack of civil discourse and an irrational certitude of their own opinions, but none come close to Trump, who now, along with the 90% of Republicans who support him, is the right.
Quoting gurugeorge
Who? Show me the evidence because your post lacks substance. Do you have anything apart from some wishful thinking mixed with a few ad-homs against professors and others you don't like?
Quoting gurugeorge
Except it's not. The right is. And that's what the complaints about political satire amount too. The right is hurt because it's not taken seriously in intellectual circles. The response is to bash intellectual circles as if they're the problem. As if intelligent people who know things and study things are the problem and the real laughing stock. It's projection at its most basic. Sure, you'll find the odd irrational professor who goes too far, but again, academics are generally miles ahead of their detractors on the right who generally resort to childish tropes like "nutty professor" to attack them. And academics are actually needed. We need academics and research and science and so on to push back against climate denial, creation science and other such demonstrable foolishness coming almost exclusively from the right. What we don't need are politically inspired talking heads who usually know nothing about the subject they're criticizing but think that by virtue of the fact that they have a public platform they should be taken seriously. Well, they shouldn't, and they aren't, outside their own commercially profitable echo chambers.
Quoting gurugeorge
Nationalism is one of the major causes of war and conflict and the most nationalistic countries are the most dangerous and the most insane. E.g. North Korea or, historically, Nazi Germany etc. This is why international organizations such as the UN were formed in order to quell nationalism and encourage global cooperation. So, this is just demonstrably flat wrong. Not that it even needs to be refuted as it's again just another one of your bare assertions not backed up by a scintilla of evidence. Also, what do you mean by suggesting an "ethnically homogenous" nationalist state is saner than the alternative (if that's what you mean)? Are you saying you would prefer America, for example, to be more ethnically homogeneous?
I am attempting to speak to a phenomenon I believe that I am witnessing, and don't mean to suggest which is actually funny, justified, or whatever.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2017/08/11/why-democrats-should-be-losing-sleep-over-generation-z/#5f6f65697878
There is an article about it, there are actually lots, now that I look.
It's extremely curious to me that you think lack of self-reflection and self-criticism is, currently, an exclusive issue for the Left, particularly after the self-flagellation that occurred immediately after Trump's election, and the outright moral hypocrisy stemming from the Right.
It's extremely curious that you consider the Left a "laughing stock" and "intellectual slapstick" when prominent so-called "intellectuals" on the Right are mere grifters, such as Ben Shapiro who sells gold and brain pills. If academia is primarily left-wing, it's because the ideas of the right have become untenable garbage, which can only exist on Youtube and self-serving podcasts.
Thanks for the link. It seems like a misleading article to me though. For example, one of the reasons Gen Z are more "moderate" and "conservative" about saving money is because they probably have relatively less of it. In the US at least, the average person is getting relatively poorer as more and more money is funneled to the rich (or at least that has been the trend from Gen X to millennials and is likely to be continuing (http://fortune.com/2018/02/19/millennials-less-money-generation-x/)). Also, what Gen Z considers socially moderate now was left-wing generations before precisely because with each generation we become more progressive. I can't access the actual study but the idea that generation Z is more moderate/conservative than baby boomers because less baby boomers considered themselves moderate/conservative isn't sensible. It was a whole different environment then and you have to focus on specific issues rather than mere self-identification to actually discover anything worthwhile in term of comparison across generations. As in, it doesn't matter if more Gen Zers call themselves conservatives than baby boomers if at the same time far more of them are in favour of gay marriage etc. than baby boomers (which they are). Anyway, if you have direct links to studies rather than news articles about them, please pass them on as looking at them makes it easier to analyze the issue properly.
Shapiro got in on Alex Jones' fake pill racket? Nauseating...
This popular right has equated sincere belief in equality and prosperity with paying lip-service to it. Every day we hear their outrage and consternation with those who highlight injustice and systemic oppression simply because the words privilege and solidarity taste sour in their mouths. More fundamentally, those people on this right really do believe in the triumph of equality and prosperity over systemic injustice, but are forced to act, think and speak in a dominated tongue.
The way discourse over these issues is prefigured makes the iterability/transmissibility of a message far more important than the truth of its content, and concomitantly adaptive internet search algorithms and content curation make it the easiest it has ever been to vindicate your worldview with facts. This is a political discourse that has more in common with advertising than with any prior political order. This feeds back into itself, creating a more perverse side effect.
Our attention is adaptively curated to maximise our interest and mouse-clicks through algorithms designed to maximise exposure, advertising has changed from a media parasite to a symbiote. This means that political worldviews are insulated from each-other to exactly the same extent that they are evinced through public resources. A brief analysis of key terms in debate with this popular right shows that its imaginative background is illogical, held together more by affect than argumentation.
SJWs are gay white knights who want to have sex with women, but are also cucks that want to have sex with women they've protected by watching them have sex with an alpha who's better than them. Transgender rights activists are attempting to subvert freedom of speech by forcing us to use certain words, but all they want is attention and recognition. Those who side with either collection of ideas are just virtue signalling, despite their penetration of and influence over all levels of political activity. There are horrible postmodernists believing in the relativism of everything, destroying society's moral norms while absolutising them, appealing to our commonalities with the outdated ideologies of Marxism and state socialism.
Everything in political discourse has turned into a signal of consumer identity. Politics nevertheless affects a common reality to which no agent can access and no group can establish. Reality has been customised for the consumer.
To do progressive politics at this point is also to manage attention through the creation of viral content and volunteer cascades, this was why Corbyn and Sanders achieved the impossible.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, for the same reason people buy branded products of a lower value/price ratio than alternatives, the right buy low-value branded right-wing tropes (about SJWs or professors or whoever).They want to be sold the stereotypes because they're comforting, and now they've got their very own media that's only too happy to sell them to them in huge quantities (along with brain pills and gold apparently). It happens on the left too, but I don't see the same degree of delusion (as is apparent in this discussion) particularly regarding science, intellectuals and anything to do with social justice, which to those selling this anti-intellectual poison reduces down to nothing more sophisticated than the frightening prospect of other people feasting on their precious tax dollars.
Quoting Baden
I absolutely agree with this, though I have a caveat. We could pretty easily have an exchange like this, lamenting the right's irrationalities and anti-science attitudes, but politically what such a dialogue would be is two left cultists talking to each other. In our safe spaces or in good company sure, we could talk like this, but we shouldn't expect to convince anyone of anything without a huge emphasis on optics.
The prevalence of snake oil changes the contours of persuasion, we have to try and redeem certain features of commonality far more than we need to mock the ridiculousness of our opponents.
I tend to agree and I'm happy to leave that (mostly) to the comedians. The reason I came into the conversation really was less to be on the offensive than to push back against the predictable recycling of the anti-SJW/lefty professor theme, which I find creeping outwards from the right, which pushes it relentlessly, and into acceptance in moderate circles (in the US. anyway).
Keep in mind, again, that I am not attempting to suggest that the article is correct. I did not read something, and believe it, I believed to have noticed something based on my first person interactions, and suggested this. I then just made a google search to demonstrate that I didn't seem to be the only one that noticed something.
I feel like some implicit accusations are being made towards imagined positioned I may hold, and ulterior motives for suggesting what I have, and the level of disgust and indignation is based in solely paranoia, I assure you.
As for disagreement that this is a genuine thing that is happening, or I am mistaken, that is perfectly fine, totally could be, but the implicit insinuations of political motivations for suggesting so are not worry of response.
I think we had much the same goal, it's very much 'on the offensive' to try and manipulate the Overton window. The real 'alt-right' has always done this, and uses free speech and our consumer ideology of the marketplace of ideas to spread. The difference between this alt-right and our popular right friends is that the alt-right knows it speaks in code.
Nothing in the post you replied to was directed at anything other than an analysis of the article you provided. What do you think I was insinuating about you? And what in the post gave you that idea?
How wrong people are for thinking what isn't the subject. What they may think, regardless of wrong or right is. The implication is not that I am suggesting this for some wish fulfilling reason or some such, and endorse it? I do endorse moderation, but not even on account of personal centrality but because it would be counter productive in any case, I believe.
I'm perfectly willing to entertain that I'm mistaken, but not because an article is misleading, or I secretly want it to be true...
I wasn't trying to imply that you were a bad person or anything like that. I just think that discussing whether 'social justice has gone to far' is a very loaded place to start a discussion on civil rights, equality and prosperity.
I'm sure we'd both agree that equality of opportunity is good, that people should not be discriminated against for their sex, gender or race by any institution, and that being politically active and active in your community to try and make things better is always commendable.
To be sure, there are some people who think vandalising a wall in a suburb to say 'Don't forget Yemen' or retweeting something progressive is a powerful political act; people like that white idiot in the Youtube meme of 'You're a fucking white male!'. Though, who could blame them for acting this way? How else are we to engage politically with our fellow people apart from social media or the protest? It isn't like those opinions are guaranteed representation in our political systems...
Anyway, despite the possibility of idiots, those people who are passionate about social justice historically are the suffragettes, the followers of Luther and Malcolm, the Haitian rebels etc. and we commend trying to act for the good of us all. Right? That's what motivates a social justice warrior, a desire for things to be better. Who could think that is a bad thing?
Nowhere in my list did I suggest you secretly wanted anything in the article to be true. It's perfectly legitimate to post an article like that in support of a point and also perfectly legitimate to critically analyse it and ask for more evidence. I don't know where you stand politically on it because you haven't made that clear.
I didn't start a discussion on civil rights equality or prosperity, but how conservative teens seem to be, and my suggestion about moderation was indicative of my feeling that it needs to be countered. Don't worry, I've been accused of white knighting enough times to count for something. The memes, and what I see being made fun of (which I've also said has upset me, and made me argumentative, and said that I wasn't laughing at any of it in any case) is mostly any social justice stuff, and do you figure that teens are watching the daily show, and kimmel or something? No... it's all memes and internet stuff from what I see.
None of this is the subject though... instead things feel like an inquisition, and a demand for auto de fe to prove allegiances...
Exactly. It takes a massive and dedicated effort at perverting the social sphere to get to where you can make people (other than manipulative elites) believe social justice and those fighting for it are the enemy.
Perhaps I'm being defensive, but I don't understand what has promoted all of these attacks on conservatism... the people I'm speaking of are not here to hear it... so I don't know how to react other than think that they're speaking to me, and trying to dissuade me.
I just said that this was something I figured based on my own personal encounters. I have zero evidence, could be wrong.
I'm mostly responding to this:
Quoting All sight
Indicating that social justice warriors in the aggregate are ridiculous is a stance on civil rights, gender equality, political solidarity and so on. It indicates a desire, though maybe not in you, to curtail the pursuit of social justice. Which always struck me as strange, considering social justice as a nebulous concept is something that everyone can agree with; it isn't articulated specifically, there are no issues associated with the stereotypical social justice warrior.
Logically this doesn't make much sense, if everyone would agree with an idea regardless of its content that idea is contentless. But politically, how expressing disapproval of social justice warriors works is that it expresses disapproval over people motivated to address injustice. All this shows is that memes about social justice warriors, especially ones expressing general disapproval of them, should not be considered logically; as a set of arguments and ideas linked with reasoning; but considered as expressing a political stance. A political stance which dislikes people who want social justice is a stance which either seeks to stymie efforts for social improvements; like greater prosperity and equality; or is incoherent.
The term social justice warrior actually was brought into internet political discourse by a concerted effort of unapologetic antifeminist trolls on the 4chan board /b/ during the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian and those perceived aligned with her. Which was then branded as 'Gamergate' by those same unapologetic antifeminist trolls. It had been used before, but this is when everyone learned it, and this is the context that imbues it with its meaning.
It used to refer precisely to those people like 'You're a fucking white male!' guy in the Youtube meme, now it refers to anyone who expresses feminist, antiracist or other social justice aligned opinions on the internet. This was done intentionally by racists and misogynists to shift the Overton window right and legitimate their bigoted opinions. Though, even the original article for it uses it disparagingly. I would like to see people using it more restrictively for the Tumblr Activism stereotype, rather than people who care about how society functions. You can read this history on 'knowyourmeme'.
Y'know, every sincere politician is a social justice warrior. Malcom X was a social justice warrior, MLK was a social justice warrior, Rosa Parks was a social justice warrior, the people who criticised the banker bailouts in 2008 were social justice warriors. Do you see a pattern? Anyone who says anything critical of the establishment can be called a social justice warrior so long as they aren't prejudiced.
Finding out all this shit made me stop using the term.
Oh, it resonates with some broader issues, so the criticisms are not aimed at you personally. Also, there are different strands of conservatism not all of which are anti-intellectual. The anti-intellectual strand just seems to be dominant at the moment (there are far more Trump/Alex Jones conservatives than George Will ones around as things stand). And as I said, I don't know where you stand politically. I'm just dealing with the issue you raised.
I didn't know all that, but it fits. :up: :up: It seems to be a fairly exclusively American trope as is thankfully. I can't imagine it gaining much currency across the pond due to the incoherence and ethical perversity you pointed out along with the less influential media presence of the right here.
I agree.
I think the damage that the inept moron Trump is doing will have severe effects not only to the GOP and the politics of the US, but in other places too.
But anyway, both the left and the right are allways under attack from extremist elements and fringe groups who want to take control of the movement and push out those in the political middle.
I don't think it makes sense to consider nations as hosts of specified ideological constructs any more. The contours of our shared social reality are determined by how shared media and institutions propagate rather than primarily the nationstate, at least for those people who are above the lowest classes in industrialised nations. I don't have a citation to prove it though, only anecdotes of the people I've spoken to from different industrialised nations have essentially the same conceptual scheme for politics, but with historical constraints on the content. This comes along with a shared culture which is the underbelly of norms expressed in widely broadcast media, which is typically American and British. Capital continues what conquest prefigured. In Lacanian/Zizekian terms the symbolic imaginary of politics is transnational.
The political realities of organising a nationstate are also to a large extent transnational too, due to global differentials in production and production specialisation. EG, Yemen has as much right to rail on the Saudi government as the British government's compliance with BAE. Again, in Lacanian/Zizekian terms, the symbolic real of politics is also transnational.
The ideology of weakening every state imposing on trade - neoliberalism - makes sense upon the backdrop of globalised production.
But, yeah, this is way too left to be seen as relevant to the SJW debate.
Rather than that cathartic rant, better response from me, would have been to highlight that the SJW meme, as a talking point, provides a criteria of exclusion for anyone who cares about women's rights or racial injustice.
and
Quoting fdrake
go hand in hand. The alt right, the bigots in their 'culture war', approach public discourse in this way. They make framing devices which, ideally, become viral content. This defines opposition out of existence - it really isn't a coincidence that any person who is antiracist or pro women's rights is a social justice warrior, it was put into the term 'SJW' for the purposes of social engineering. The criticisms of systemic injustices that are excluded through the term become 'combatants in the marketplace of ideas', which serves only to legitimate bigotry as the inversion of social justice.
That feminism, antifascism and antiracism have become disparaging slurs is a testament to the effectiveness of these framing devices. Your usual somewhat left of centre Christopher Hitchens loving internet rationalist accepts these ideas as reasonable subjects of debate, which shifts the Overton window right by the presupposition that equality for women and mitigating systemic injustices need to be defended in principle. Doing what you can to make the world a better place has almost become toxic because some shitlords living in their mothers' basements Hitler saluting each other over webcam who decry their involuntary celibacy while wearing only a cum-stained fedora have a better practical understanding of political discourse than our impassioned champions of civil rights.
Thanks for providing an example of what I was talking about :)
If there had been any genuine, heartfelt self-critique, the Left would not have continued to do for the past 18 months exactly what it did to lose the election.
Self-critique involves considering the possibility that you might be entirely wrong in your asssumptions, not merely mulling over possible tactical tweaks.
But thanks for the amusing Freudian slip: "critical self-defense." :D
I'm also on my phone, so it was simply an autocorrect mistake, but whatever helps you feel better about yourself
Take the current problem of Venezuelans fleeing to Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Columbia. On the one hand, of course they are fleeing -- life in Venezuela has become economically untenable for millions. On the other hand, the neighboring states are not rolling in gold. Let an aid agency exec. who spoke this morning stand in for the SJW viewpoint. "People have a right to go wherever they want to live!" he said. "The response in neighboring states is xenophobia."
No, it isn't "xenophobia". It's competition for scare resources. The theory that people should be able to move to and live wherever they wish sounds good in theory, but it entirely dismisses the people in the destination cities. Their right to live where they wish also requires a stable economy and decent pay, and it isn't xenophobia for them to fear the consequences of 500,000 or a million economic refugees suddenly taking up residence.
The argument for refugee rights is incoherent when it is one sided -- and quite often SJW talk is very one-sided. Pay equity for women isn't a simple issue. Claiming that all women are victimized by wage discrimination is sometimes true, but is often not. Men who do not adhere to the desired corporate commitment of time and talent (long and late hours, extremely competitive environments, continuous employment over decades, etc.) are also penalized, just as women are who do not conform to the desired pattern.
I'm well informed about how black people have been and are now discriminated against in a multitude of ways. Still, I don't buy everything that black activists are doing. some of the most critical black problems can only be addressed by the black community. Gun violence, for instance. It's a lifestyle issue that the black community has to resolve. Nobody can do it for them. Stopping traffic on freeways accomplishes nothing useful beyond publicity (and as every school girl knows, there's no such thing as bad publicity). Likewise, the failure of blacks to buy into property isn't entirely the fault of banks. Even illegal immigrants manage to buy houses on their low wages. How do they do it? They scrimp and save, live at the lowest standard of living tolerable for a time, and work hard at whatever work they can get. This method works -- it just means that everyone has to forego most spending until the family has enough saved to make a down payment. Poor Americans, white or black, generally don't see their way clear to making these kind of temporary sacrifices.
I expect the shock jocks on the radio to be one-sided and unsubtle. People working for social justice know more, can be, and should be more nuanced in their thinking and strategy.
Yes. We are the chattering classes after all.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Of course it's understandable to be anxious about the effects of mass immigration on your community. Even though there's not a consensus of evidence that mass immigration effects a nation's economy as badly as people fear it does, it still makes sense that people get uncomfortable. In most of the industrialised countries I'm aware of, the only formal exceptions being Norway and Sweden, people with very little money end up sharing space with refugees and poor immigrants as a byproduct of housing policy. So I certainly can see why people end up worrying about having 'their' space coopted by people of different races. What it actually reveals is that the spaces they love were never theirs to begin with, they have very little power on who comes and goes, over whether houses in the area meet basic standards of living and so forth.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Framing anxiety about immigrants in terms of competition for scarce resources, jobs, food etc only makes sense to the extent that a government fails to extend and enforce basic employment rights to those immigrants. There's no evidence that mass immigration is bad for an economy, and no evidence that it causes food or job shortages; the former because of massive overproduction and the availability of cheap food through globalised food production, the latter because population increases create jobs about as much as they demand them. Unemployment needs more than immigration to increase, it needs a state to fail its population.
Dealing with the facts, or at least the academic consensus, is a lot different from dealing with the optics of the situation. With this in mind, I believe it's important to affirm the difficulties people feel over immigration, like concerns about cultural change and job market saturation. Saying yes to treating people decently doesn't always make decency easy. Especially in the context of systemic injustice.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, it's not a simple issue and overt sexism and racism should not be given the sole blame for the economic and social disparities women and non-whites are subject to. All well and good, it's important to study these things to see where they're coming from and how to alleviate them.
But, despite that your analysis is very considered and sympathetic to those who like social justice, this level of consideration is not part of the discourse surrounding the disparagement of SJWs. Most of the time the term is used to browbeat on anyone who highlights or acts against injustices, or promotes prosperity through community food initiatives and the like.
A reasoned more central viewpoint becoming a shield for bigoted opinions is similar to UKIP in the UK being a socially acceptable face for racism, they co-opted the debate about the tension between EU membership and national sovereignty. Being pro-EU membership was equated with being OK with immigrants, being anti-EU was equated with being not-OK with immigrants, and the discussion followed the cultural tropes Baden highlighted earlier in the thread. Similar to the Gamergate thing I brought up earlier with regard to the SJW term, these equivocations in the debate have been advanced by white nationalists for as long as there have been white nationalists.
So, people end up speaking in code even when they don't realise it. The code is mostly a bundle of framing devices, and the spread of those framing devices is what's shifted the Overton window right in a lot of ways in the last couple of years.
What @fdrake said, and to reiterate that by using the term "SJW" disparaging, you're buying into a phrasing invented and pushed by people who don't share your sense of nuance, who consider any moves towards social justice anathema, and who consider this kind of language a weapon to be used broadly against anyone who doesn't share their right-wing viewpoint. Their goal, and it's succeeding to an extent, is to turn us all into "useful idiots" unwittingly arguing on their loaded terms.
No, that's not the case at all. I expect that there will be some core principles on which we'll never agree (unless obviously one of us does shift our core beliefs); but I also expect some measure of civil discourse and occasional compromise, and I don't appreciate being demonized by people who are so all-fired sure of their position that they prejudicially view anyone who disagrees with them as evil, stupid, deplorable, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it
Sure, but it's fine for you to demonise and mock young people interested in a fairer society as "SJWs" and teachers at universities as despised elites etc. What civil discourse is possible with the targets of your scorn? Again, your hypocrisy makes your position incoherent.
I don't know, it depends on whether I'm deplatformed by them or not.
Which sarcastic one-liner just underlines my point. I hardly know any poster here who's been less civil and thoughtful in his attitude towards the targets of his political criticisms than you. You set up a bunch of right-wing stereotypes of hated lefties, proceed to tell us how much they're hated, and then complain about you being the victim of demonization. And for some odd reason you can't see the problem with that. Why don't you set an example by offering some nuanced criticisms rather than these paper-thin caricatures of the left you present? Then you might have a right to expect some reciprocation. As it is, you're not giving your opponents a reason to take you seriously.
......
Quoting gurugeorge
Quoting gurugeorge
Quoting gurugeorge
Quoting gurugeorge
Quoting gurugeorge
Yeah dude, totally not racist, sexist, transphobic...
And so on and so forth down to the present. The "Overton Window" - the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse - changes over time, certainly.
Race and/or ethnicity, sex and/or gender, any number of identities, and feminism don't seem to have been shut out of the Overton Window. (Like, "Would the love that dare not speak its name please shut up for a while!") Some operatives in the swamp of the right wing may ridicule social justice warrior operatives in the left wing swamp on the other side of the road. If "SJW" is the worst epithet right wingers can come up with... stop worrying.
I don't find SJW as dismissive a handle as you two seem to find it. It seems like a good fit, to me. SJW is no more offensive than "weekend warrior". I've been a "social justice warrior" a number of times. Also a "do gooder". SJW is less derisive than "do gooder". It's better than "guilty white liberal"; it beats "dead white males" -- a category to which I'm close enough to be touchy about.
The efforts of the majority of people committed to the fight for social justice strike me as very similar to the the efforts of anti-war peace activists during Vietnam--efforts that I thought very highly of at the time. We marched to Boston Commons (or wherever the location was) and chanted slogans and sang "we shall over come" and listened to impassioned speeches. Then we went home.
There was an enormous amount of talk among small groups, tons of planning, lots of leaflets and buttons were printed, arguments had with family and friends, and so on. A million people showed up one fall day in Washington, D.C. -- 1 out of every 200 Americans overflowed the mall for that biggest peace demonstration.
And you know what the concrete outcome of all this was? PFFT. Zilch. Zero. Nada. The war lasted another 5 years, unabated. It is as safe to criticize SJWs now as it was to criticize hippie faggot peaceniks in 1970, because there was very little of importance that hinged on their efforts.
I disparage social justice advocates now no more than I disparage peace efforts 50 years ago. But let's be clear: Neither peace advocates nor social justice advocates ever got anywhere close to getting their hands on the levers of social and economic policy. Those levers are never left unattended or unguarded and they are well protected behind locked thick-steel doors.
The benefits of social justice advocacy and peace activism flow primarily to the activists, to the benefactors--not to the beneficiaries. Why? Because the act of protesting is good for the protestor. Literally. It's a healthy exercise in every sense of the word. It just happens to be totally ineffective as a method of getting at those policy levers.
No one ever went broke under-estimating the average rationality of human beings.
Quoting gurugeorge
It is well documented, true enough, and it isn't accidental. Black people were generally the recipients of very unfair treatment in housing policy. FHA rules explicitly or practically excluded blacks from its inception in 1935 through at least 1985. By the time this institutional disability was eliminated, housing prices had risen far too high for blacks to be able to buy houses. They were cut out of the major wealth generating device of middle income Americans. The black family has also been subjected to welfare policies which undermined the stability of families. The black population that migrated en masse out of the south in the 20th century were not able to establish an economic base for themselves before the depression, automation, and globalization began to eliminate the kind of jobs that they were generally hired to do.
Like most people of all races, blacks have authored some of their own problems. They have not collectively prioritized education; they have not practiced thrift as effectively as they could (cutting themselves off from internally generated funds); et cetera.
Not true. It did not continue "unabated". Here are the numbers for the last years of the war. It's no coincidence that its winding down coincides with increasing levels of protest.
Year------U.S. Troop numbers
1968-----536100
1969-----475200
1970-----334600
1971-----56800
1972-----24200
1973-----50
Quoting Bitter Crank
Not getting direct hands on the policy levers (though this does happen in the case of revolutions—what about those SJWs in France in the 1700s?) doesn't make protest ineffective. It can be very effective, and the benefits flow to everyone. Society doesn't move on its own but when it's pushed. And those that are pushing are those that will be mass-labeled and disparaged as SJWs by actors with ulterior political motives who would just as well see society not move at all, but stagnate and rot rather than to give an inch to their political opponents.
If anything makes social justice advocacy and action "meaningless" it is the belief that "the establishment" can be easily toppled, like Joshua marching around Jericho making noise until the walls come tumbling down.
The Establishment has walls that do not crumble from trumpet blasts. The foundations of the very thick, highly reinforced concrete walls are very deep -- right on bed rock. The gates of the establishment are closed to noise makers, social justice activists, do gooders, preachers, the perfectly politically correct (or not) and all sorts of other riff raff. Admission is by invitation only.
"Social Justice Activism will be tolerated in so far as it doesn't interfere with the flow of commerce. You are free in so far as you obey. We consider "irrelevant" what social justice advocates do -- so keep on doing it. Our motto is: "We don't care; we don't have to."
Aw, don't give up you big jellyfish ;). There's surely a happy medium achievable between belief in an imminent utopian revolution and despair at any change occurring at all, no?
ALERT ALERT
major memory error
So... the Moratorium Committee organized the biggest Washington, D.C. demonstration for November 15, 1969 -- that's the one I was thinking of. (Hey, this was 50 years ago... I can't remember everything.)
Looking back at these figures, and at the time (when anti-war sentiment was peak) it didn't seem like it ended so soon. But... we were out of there in 1973.
1968-----536100
1969-----475200
1970-----334600
Social change has happened -- you've seen it, I've seen it. But I don't feel like I can claim with any certainty what it was, exactly, that led to it.
Activists are one force in any change. Take school integration: There was some agitation for integration prior to the 1954 SCOTUS decision, Brown Vs. the Board of Education which ruled that separate was not equal, and segregation was unconstitutional. By the time integration was widespread, far more than activists were involved: the US Department of Justice; Federal Marshals; the National Guard; local police; an army of lawyers, school boards, city councils, state governments, mass media, political parties, etc -- all this on both sides of the issue.
Somewhere along the line, school integration reached regional peaks, and then declined. Many schools are now effectively re-segregated.
The process of de-segregating and then re-segregating covers more than 60 years. There have been so many players involved, it is difficult to identify WHO or WHAT was most instrumental. At least two generations of activists -- pro integration and anti integration -- have been involved. Suburban land developers, building mass housing after WWII, were one of the major players. Mortgage lenders, operating on 1935 guidelines, were a second major group of players. Both would seem far removed from education policy. Despite an immense amount of litigation, community action, and so on -- many schools remain as segregated as schools ever were.
And not least -- segregation or integration is maintained by the individual decisions of millions of parents making family decisions about education.
Interesting example about school integration. Thanks. BTW I forgot to reference the troop numbers thing. If anyone is curious: https://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwatl.htm
Which sarcastic one-liner evidently went over your head.
The topic of the conversation when you came bustling in with your irrelevant tu quoque was the Left and the reasons why it's being laughed at, and the reasons why it failed, and will continue to fail for the foreseeable future.
If you and Maw could possibly restrain yourselves from reflexively committing fallacy after fallacy for a moment, perhaps it might be an interesting conversation to have.
Yes, correct. None of what I said was in the least bit racist, sexist or transphobic. The fact that you think the opposite demonstrates one of the reasons why the Left has lost and will continue to keep losing for the foreseeable future.
You realize saying that sort of thing makes you a "racist" and a "Nazi," right? :)
In the first place, we all recognize that there's a well-meaning impulse behind SJW activism. But you can call a thing a name without the thing actually exemplifying that name. Would it be wrong to laugh at the term, "The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea?"
In the second place, "social justice" is an Orwellian oxymoron. "Social justice," like many other Left-wing buzzwords, actually reverses the meaning of a commonly-understood term - IOW, it means, precisely injustice.
And you wonder why we laugh.
No it doesn't. Promoting the following pseudosicentific nonsense does make you a racist though:
[quote=gurugeorge]"...we are divisible into sub-species by means of both plain observation and more recondite scientific investigations (into relative genetic closeness or distance). For humans, there are 3 broad and about 7 or 9 more refined sub-species, or "races,"
...It turns out that of the three main races, Asians tend to be the least promiscuous, Blacks the most, with Whites inbetween."[/quote]
Which is why you were warned that if you say it again, you'll be banned. For... being a racist. Unlike BC who is not.
Whether it is "pseudoscientific nonsense" and "racist "or not is a topic for potentially civil debate - but not on this forum, apparently, and since I respect the Forum's prerogatives - after all, we wouldn't want this wonderful resource to get into trouble, would we? - I'll leave it at that.
Yes, let's leave it at that. Your previous comments are not on-topic anyway, and I'd prefer we stick to the OP here. Future commentary on that issue will be deleted. Though what you have said in this discussion is fair target for criticism.
I sincerely doubt that Orwell, a left-anarchist who fought Fascists, would consider 'social justice' "Orwellian". The fact that movements for LGBT rights, worker rights, minority rights, women's rights, etc. were, and continue to be, fought for under the placard of justice, demonstrates how daft your opinion is.
Quoting gurugeorge
The reigning intellectual movement of the modern right calls themselves, in earnest, the "Intellectual Dark Web".
Curiously (but unsurprisingly), your examples of "injustice" are strawman that the aforementioned movements aren't targeted, but rather injustices that are the results from systemic oppression, or structural imbalances, e.g. black wealth inequality, worker 'unfreedom' and the resulting wealth inequality, reproductive rights and the opportunity for reproductive freedom. But since you believe in *cough*pseudoscientificgeneticdeterminism*cough*, I'm not surprised you think certain systemic inequalities cannot be eradicated or even mitigated.
Quoting gurugeorge
"Classical Liberalism" is merely a re-brand for those of a libertarian-conservative persuasion, who don't want to use their terms because of the toxicity often associated with them. Libertarian is often considered too radical, and conservative too geriatric to be considered as an attractive, "reasonable" political position. Further, the term "Classical Liberal" is erroneously considered to be a branch of political philosophy under which, (per Rubin) John Locke, Adam Smith, and JS Mill, Jefferson, et. al. in the pitiful attempt to give it an air of intellectualism. Make no mistake, classical liberalism, as espoused by the "Intellectual Dark Web", is just a re-branding of conservatism. Brett Weinstein can call himself whatever he wants, but he's certainly not a Leftist. There's nothing "amusing" about the name, it's just cringingly stupid.
Quoting Maw
But that's what's yet to be demonstrated. If you simply pre-judge that every observed inequality of outcome is the result of "systemic oppression or structural imbalances," then all you've got is a pseudo-science, because you're denying empirically obvious and evident differences in endowment for the sake of a fantasy idea of what human beings are like.
IOW, you are effectively starting with the unexamined assumption that people have equal potential, therefore any observed difference in outcome must be the result of "systemic oppression or structural imbalances."
The reality is that some inequalities are the result of systemic oppression and structural imbalances, yes, and historically a lot were; but some aren't, and today most aren't. (For example, in Sweden, which has the most highly developed system of gender equality of any country on Earth, 85% of nurses are female. Go figure.)
Quoting Maw
Those thinkers did represent a "branch of political philosophy" - it used to be called "liberalism" until the term was hijacked by more socialist-influenced liberals (people who would have been called "social democrats" in Europe) who pushed the liberal faction in the US further to the Left in the course of the 20th century, so Friedrich Hayek (I believe it was, in the 1960s) coined the term "classical liberal" to denote the older form of liberalism. The term has been used that way among conservatives and libertarians since then, but it wasn't invented by them as some sort of grand cover-up plan, far less by the IDW people.
Quoting Maw
Hey, blame the journo who invented it in an attempt to mock/smear them.
No, it was deleted because you repeated in it (only in different words) the essence of your pseudo-scientific race-based and racist theories. Again, being ignorant is not an excuse for being racist and we've given you more than enough leeway already. Final warning.
To be honest, both the left and right have a habit of trying to rebrand themselves, find again their roots and try to sell their ideology to a new generation that is totally ignorant of the past.
Something totally normal for political movements.
Inequalities that have resulted from structured oppression, historically and up to the modern day, have been well studied and documented. Feel free to read The New Jim Crow, Stamped From The Beginning, The Color of Money, and more. You are simply more interested in pseudo-science which suggests that these inequalities are the result of inherent genetic dispositions of gender and ethnicity. Your pseudo-science also doesn't explain wealth inequality, worker oppression, LGBT oppression etc.
Your whole spiel about "equal potential" and that the Left wants "equal outcome" is a tired strawman that I would expect from a high school student.
Quoting gurugeorge
Mill considered himself a socialist, Jefferson was influenced by Locke, but also by Paine, who was radically different from Locke. While Adam Smith strongly favored pro-worker regulation. My point is is that there is no 'umbrella' term with which to fit these diverse set of thinkers. To place them under a single political philosophy is ahistorical, and yet that's exactly what modern classic liberals attempt to do. Regardless, my main point is that classic liberalism today is just a right-wing marketing ploy.
Quoting gurugeorge
According to Bari Weiss, who is a fan of and has written about the IDW, the term was coined by Weinstein.
Seems to occur more on the Right, who just re-package immoral positions for a modern age.
As I've pointed out twice in this conversation, both things are possible: inequalities as a result of systemic imbalances and oppression, and inequalities as a result of different natural endowments. You are the one who's ignoring an important factor, I'm acknowledging both.
Quoting Maw
Well then it should be easy for you to knock down then, shouldn't it? (But please, without circular reasoning ... without assuming that all inequalities must be caused by systemic factors ;) )
Quoting Maw
Yes there is, they were called "liberals" - and as I said, Hayek used the term "classical liberal" to distinguish that older strain of liberalism from the social democracy that had come to be called "liberalism" in the US.
And as I pointed out previously, the Left is interested in socially-made injustices. That's the focus of the conversation I'm trying to have with you, but since you are intellectually incapable of grasping that concept and since the lines between socially constructed inequalities and inequalities that are the result of "natural endowment" are blurred for you, you continually digress into sciamachy with strawman.
Quoting gurugeorge
It's simple: even given complete equal opportunity, the Left doesn't assume that outcomes will be equal, or that potentials are equal. No one believes that given equal opportunities, anyone can be a professional basketball player. Read Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum and spare me of your stupidity and your strawmen.
Quoting gurugeorge
You can repeat yourself until you're blue in the face, but as I pointed out it's mistaken to apply any umbrella term to a diverse range of thinkers that spans over 100 years.
Just who has the most immoral positions naturally depends on one's political views.
The left had it's heyday of repackaging after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nowdays the younger generations are blissfully ignorant what the old Moscow-supported extreme left was like with it's Marxist-Leninist lithurgy in Europe or elsewhere. (In an ironic twist we now have a Moscow-supported extreme right.)
I don't think those talking about classic liberalism and people like Adam Smith are repackaging things. In the era of Trump they are more likely just to uphold the views of the "ordinary" right in the face of an imbecile movement (that believes in an inept narcissist) and that will likely chant "Lock her up" in the US at least until the 2020 elections (or until when Trump is thrown out of office or resigns). And in Europe there will be those few who march under new silly flags, but their extreme ideologies won't find a fertile ground as the people are just fed up with the botched immigration policies (at least in their view). The media will naturally make it a huge thing.
There isn't so much intense ideological passion in these movements as in 20th Century. Collective movements both on the right and on the left have too many skeletons in their closet from history.
History won't repeat itself, it will just rhyme a bit.
Sure, but have you actually identified socially-made injustices, or are you confusing them with inequalities that are the result of natural endowment? IOW, how much due diligence have you done separating out the factors?
Quoting Maw
Leftists always project. :)
Quoting Maw
My argument is that it's an unexamined assumption - it's not something you proclaim, because it's obviously so stupid. But it's the logically necessary premise on which your house of cards must be built, otherwise you'd be bothered by the question of which unequal outcomes you observe are the result of differences in natural endowment, and which are the result of oppressive human action (and therefore a matter for justice to sort out) - because obviously you wouldn't want to accuse people of oppression if they're not actually guilty of it, right?
Quoting Maw
The term "liberal" has been used as an umbrella term for those thinkers for several hundred years, and they're not all that diverse, they share some core principles.
What is it that makes you think the assumption is "unexamined", as opposed to "examined, but not reaching a conclusion you agree with". You seem to be mistaking the ability to quote 'scientific' research and statistics, for a conclusion which would be reached by any rational person who examined then. Scientific studies do not show things to be conclusively the case, they derive theories, try to falsify them and then upon failing to do so, present the theory to the community. Statistics are even more vague and routinely misinterpreted.
I don't see any reason to presume the left has not examined the extent of natural endowment.
I think we can stop saying "natural endowment" and just use "genetics" as it's just a weasel word term anyway.