I first ran into the "100 percent my way, or 100 percent the highway" thinking of Social Justice Warriors within Gnu Atheism, and even more within its Brat Pack-level offshoot, Atheism Plus. And, I'm far from alone in seeing them that way; it's part of why many people like me don't use the "Big A" word of ourselves.
Well, at Atheism Plus, the scurrying Plusers are primarily devoted to SJW work on behalf of women. But, it's not just any women, or any gender issues. No, it's on behalf of nth-wave feminism. That's a phrase I coined to deliberately riff on Naomi Wolf and others who talk about third-wave feminism, with the idea that when one wave permanently crests, you have another already stored up in the SJW wave machine.
But, my intro threatens to wander.
At the NBC Sports blog, Hardball Talk, in the last few months, I've run into race-focused SJWs. The shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson's been a big catalyst, and a more recent shooting inside St. Louis has only made things worse.
To critique, or even criticize these folks, and take you readers along for that, I need to background myself.
Almost all of my journalism work has been at "community papers." These are the primary non-daily small town papers, partly but not entirely, of the lore and legend of 1950s TV, Norman Rockwell paintings and such.
Anyway, at such places, we are often the sole full-time news writer. So, we're the ones at the city council, county commission and school board meetings. We're the ones at new business ribbon cuttings, taking pictures. We're the ones writing feature stories about little Timmy's battle with leukemia.
In short, we're around town and mingling with people.
Well, for 11 of the past 14 years, approximately, I've been editor, or editor and publisher, in towns that were either majority-minority, or black majority. And, lived in all of them, lest any SJWs get any ideas. In fact, my current location, where I've been at for the last two and one-half years, has a black police chief, which gets directly to the "cops, criminals and race" myth.
Do cops use excessive force at times? Yes. Does such excessive force occasionally involved the end result of a fatal shooting? Yes. Do such cops sometimes not get whatever "justice" (I philosophically reject the word, hence the scare quotes) they might deserve? Yes. Is such at times excessive force, occasionally resulting in a fatal shooting, sometimes not treated with due "justice," from white cops and black residents? Yes.
Note the caveats in bold in each sentence, though. Short of violence, I've written a news story about a cop with bigoted attitudes on both race and socioeconomic class; I don't have to read national newspapers.
Do the majority of cops do their job, both within in their race and in dealing with other races, in a professional manner? Yes.
Back to the local situation. The black police chief here, with a force that's about 50 percent black or Hispanic, has had the mayor pro-tem, also black, occasionally play the bad cop card, at least in the form of a rhetorical question. Well, other than the one cop with the attitude, I've seen none of it, and the chief hasn't reported it.
That leads me to the next issue.
Are black victims of police force often, if not always, persons with criminal pasts? Yes? If they are injured, or even killed, in an attempt at bittersweet consolation, will their parents sometimes claim to their dying day that "Johnny" was an angel? Yes. Does that change the fact that they had criminal pasts and were no angels? No.
So, first, I invite these SJW friends to come live where I live.
Second, I note that, in my career, I've seen white on white police brutality, white on white false arrests, and a white on white fatal shooting by police. As with many such cases, the suspect had drugs in his system. (Sadly, in some cases, which we shouldn't necessarily try to call either "justified" or "unjustified," the person who got shot was suffering from mental illness.)
These don't make as big of headlines. They're "dog bites man" stories that don't play on either conservative (largely white conservative) stereotypes of minorities out of control, nor do they play on largely minority interest group liberals' stereotypes of cops having it out for blacks.
Back to the SJWs, and their attempts to use "privilege." Because this gets back to my invitation to come live where I do, especially if you're richer and living, if not in white-majority, upper-middle-class to upper-class money majority areas.
This claim that nobody else can understand them and their unique issues?
Above all (not that it would stop them) it's based on fallacious reasoning. A straight white man may not know what it's like to be these other things, but he can sympathize, and even work for a common cause, to the degree its common, while rejecting your toolkit.
Besides lesbian or trans/nonwhite/women don't know, unless they have it/are one themselves, what it's like to be autistic, to have Crohn's, to be a recovering or nonrecovering drug addict, and a whole host of other things. "Privilege" is a two-edged sword, especially when many SJWs themselves are white, and many are not poor, either. Money is the original "privilege" after all.
That said, this is about as likely to persuade SJWers that they could catch more flies with honey than vinegar as I am to vote Republican. And I think I know why.
The more and more interaction I have with SJWers, the more and more I see a martyr complex at work.
Bluntly?
You're all a bunch of fucking Jehovah's Witnesses who actually like getting cyberdoors slammed in your face.
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