Many social justice warriors seem more concerned with tearing down, blacklisting, and deplatforming others, or even just whining about them, rather than working hard to actually boost social justice, whatever you might take that to mean. Most of that struggle requires building things in a positive way, I am sorry to say.
What concerns me about SJWs is their reliance on intimidation. To use a current example, AIPAC always aimed to be strictly non-partisan. It used to be able to get ambitious Democrats to speak at its convention. No more. The SJWs have successfully delegitimized AIPAC among Democrats. Going forward, Democratic Congressmen will think twice about receiving visitors from AIPAC. AIPAC has been castrated.
Maybe you don’t care much for AIPAC. I have never attended the convention, and I wouldn’t call myself a fan. The point I am making is not about AIPAC, but about the manner in which it was shot down.
If SJWs can scare Democrats away from AIPAC, then they can intimidate anybody. If this is what these folks can do as a cult minority, imagine the climate of fear we will live under once they seize the apparatus of the state.
The government is in the business of selling special privileges. “Social justice” and “intersectionality” are little more than rationales for demanding such privileges. Until government closes shop, this sort of thing will continue.
“Social justice” is a meaningless term. It means everything and nothing, and therefore can never be “achieved” and deemed successful. You can’t measure it. You can’t draw it. You can’t define it. Thus, it’s the perfect descriptor.
It’s like “hope and change”: its sole purpose is to justify whatever your objective du jour might be.
” To use a current example, AIPAC always aimed to be strictly non-partisan. It used to be able to get ambitious Democrats to speak at its convention. ”
Schumer and Pelosi are speaking as is DeBlasio.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-aipac-downplays-absence-of-democratic-presidential-contenders-at-conference-1.7044938
I find the claim that the presidential candidates are not going due to some mysterious SJW effect is kind of bizarre. Feels much more like old fashioned politics. Netanyahu is supportive of the GOP (and vice versa) and Trump in particular and AIPAC supports Netanyahu. AIPAC may have wanted to be bipartisan at some point, but they are way past that point. That shift to support the GOP precedes , by many years, this current event.
Steve
Care to elaborate how AIPAC “supports” Netanyahu? I mean, in any way different from the way it “supported” the Labor governments under Rabin, Peretz and Barak?
I’m not a big fan of AIPAC, but their mission is to support the policies Israeli government at the time, whatever it might be. It is not their mission to choose sides in Israeli politics (or American politics). However, they bent over backwards not to alienate the Democrats who supported Obama’s abortion of a “deal” with Iran, saying, in effect, “we agree to disagree, but we’re still friends.” And still this is not enough for the SJWS, who demand that AIPAC adopt the suicidal positions of the Israeli far left.
AIPAC cannot maintain “bipartisanship” in America when one of the two major parties despises Israel.
[personal attacks are deleted–ed.]
http://www.policyconference.org/gallery/speakers2019.asp#filter
Check out how many democratic members if congress are speaking. I quit counting at 16.
I argue in this piece at Areo Magazine that status, prestige and dominance, is at the heart of what I prefer to think of as prestige progressivism.
https://areomagazine.com/2019/03/05/virtue-signal-or-piety-display-the-search-for-cognitive-identity-and-the-attack-on-social-bargaining/
Moralised intimidation is not incidental, it is central.
That’s a nice article. I just did a five minute skim, and already have learned a few things.
A nice analytical distinction I could pick up even in that skim is your suggested use of “Piety display” rather than “Virtue Signaling.”
Good work.
The snowflakes seem far off, stereotypical, like they come from Doonesbury comic strips. I am not sure I ever meet an admitted snowflake. I think a college kid could tolerate them with enough beer, which I remember as a requirement.
Which ones are the snowflakes?
I find it odd that you mourn the treatment of AIPAC by SJW’s as victims of intimidation, when the tactics of intimidation toward our government representatives have been in AIPAC’s playbook Since it’s inception. Is what’s good for the goose not also good for the gander?
I am very anti-SJW, mainly because I think they lack good judgement and perspective, for example about what constitutes hate, discrimination, privilege, etc. Basically, anything can be described as privilege in their framework and, hence, their conception of privilege has no meaning.
In some cases, as on college campuses, they have indeed resorted to physical intimidation, e.g., blocking, assaulting, and shouting down speakers. The AIPAC situation should not really be called “intimidation”. SJWs merely threaten to oppose any Dems that attend AIPAC. If that is enough to scare Dems from attending, that just means that SJWs are too influential in Democratic politics. SJWs are a large enough faction in the Democratic Party that too many Dems need to care about SJW votes to win nomination. Calling that “intimidation” is the same mistake that SJWs make when they label everything “privilege”.
How do we get subversive thoughts beyond the impermeable blood-brain barriers that SJWs have erected? How do we suggest, for example, that people might be individuals who should be treated and listened to as such and not as cardboard cutout stand-ins for a tribe?