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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I think something more descriptive such as "social justice warriors", "DEI proponents" or "applied intersectionality" would be much more apt. It also is more likely to be used by those people to describe themselves.

I guess I have some problems with these as alternatives. Of them only really SJW selects the whole of the blob and I think it'd have the same problem of being rejected as a label by many that it fits if for no other reason that it's a kind of silly formulation. I don't know how long you've been aware of this particular naming dispute but there was a move to call them social justice activists which I'm happy to use but never really got wide adoption. I suspect because it's a mouthful.

The problem, I think, is that this blob intentionally wants to resist being named because it wants to assert its contentious beliefs as normal, the null hypothesis of ideologies. This is a very privileged and powerful position to be in. It lets them stake out radical positions and if those positions prove disastrous it doesn't taint the rest of the ideology. They don't want the failure of things like "defund the police", a sentiment widely shared by adherents of this blob, to color people's perception on the other ideas they propose.

I guess my question for you is do you deny the existence of this blob entirely? As in do you deny that there is a large contingent of people on the left that are bought into nearly every radical left leaning position including but not limited to:

  • anti-racism( as expressed by Kendi and including race concious policy)
  • climate doomerism
  • anti-western and anti-US in particular geopolitical positions (broadly can be expected to take whichever side of any conflict that is lest aligned with the west)
  • intersectional and privileged based understandings of race and gender,
  • anti-capitalism economics ( this is a big one and expresses itself and many ways)
  • acab or at least substantially anti-police beliefs
  • suspicious of free speech
  • LGBTQ activism

If you point to a person with this perspective on any one of these issues I would bet they have something like a 95% chance to believe in every other. That's really seems like a group that I should be able to easily point to.

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