Worst of Social Justice

[RavynousHunter]

My boss has misspelled my first name many times.  When the proper spelling is literally staring him in the face, because its my screen name on all my messages.  Its spelled with a K at the end, not a C, damn it!

[rookie]

I've stopped answering to any variations of my last name. Anyone who I want to listen to will know how to pronounce a word that ends in ONE.

[Ghoti]

I spell my last name (and my legal first name) reflexively and people still manage to mess it up... even when the correct spelling is already written down somewhere in their field of vision.

[TheUnknown]

While my last name is one syllable, I can think of three different ways it could be spelled due to how it's pronounced. 

[Art Vandelay]

I have a rather obsucre (in its homeland) Croatian surname, so that's a lot of fun to deal with. I've never known anyone to get it right on the first try.

[Ultimate Paragon]

[Askold]

...Well, there are real ethical issues that must be thought about IF we ever manage to make an AI program that really is self aware. If they are self aware does that mean that owning them is slavery and so on.

[Sigmaleph]

Today I learned that autism can now be a gender

OK, this bugs me. "Gender" is a ridiculously hard concept to pin down, probably because it's a complex interaction of social and biological factors we only really understand via introspection that is hard to compare. And there's evidence that autism interacts with gender issues in some way (e.g. autistic people are more likely to experience gender dysphoria). The raw observation that some aspects of gender for autistic people can only be understood in the context of autism is at least plausible (I'd argue probable, but don't have anything beyond intuition to back that up).

I personally disagree with the notion of reifying that as a separate gender in itself, but to be honest I prefer to err on the side of letting people define their gender identity however they like*. This is not the worst of social justice. This is not even the bad parts of social justice. This is just the entirely-harmless-but-easy-to-mock parts of people trying to come to terms with identity issues. It might be wrong, though there's an argument to be had even there. But putting it together with the vicious bullying and anti-free-speech and all the other actually toxic SJ bullshit seems kinda off.


*am I biased here? Sure. I have weird gender identity issues I go back and forth on. But I'm trying to not make this personal.

[TheL]

To be fair, though, Texans don't exactly do a lot to fight the stereotype. I mean, just look at their recent record in governors. Or how pretty much every Texan I've known (spoiler: two people) wears a cowboy hat and makes their drawl as obvious as possible.

There's 27 million people in Texas. About ten percent of those voted for the current governor.

Wait, really? That's it?

That's what Wikipedia tells me. 2,796,547 people voted for Greg Abbot, 1,835,596 for Wendy Davis.

Yep!  This is what happens when young folks don't vote in state or local elections.

[TheL]

One of my surnames is in the top five or so for the country and people still manage to misspell it.

And you live in a Spanish-speaking country.  Spanish has just about the EASIEST, least-ambiguous phonetic system I've ever seen.

[Sigmaleph]

One of my surnames is in the top five or so for the country and people still manage to misspell it.

And you live in a Spanish-speaking country.  Spanish has just about the EASIEST, least-ambiguous phonetic system I've ever seen.

Yup. Though sometimes I think that it leaves people unprepared for the few occasions where spelling is not obvious from pronunciation (v/b, s/z/c, and so on, depending on dialect).

[Sigmaleph]

Forgive me, Sig, if my post came across as...wonked. I think we may disagree a bit on gender (but that's possibly due to my own biases and bad experiences, and I do try to account for that in any given situation), but I think we both agree that the idea of just slapping all of the complicated issues that autism can bring to someone's gender identity onto a single label is just a smidge insulting.

Might be that it is. But mostly my problem (and this is really a problem with this thread as a whole, your post was just a prompt) is that it puts on the same level some harmless if slightly weird comment on someone making up a new word for their gender with the actually harmful, sometimes abusive tactics people use in the name of social justice. These are not problems on the same level! SJ encourages a finely-grained and individualised exploration of gender and sexuality, which is a good thing in my book. It has failure modes, like a jargon explosion that it's impossible to keep up with and some dubious classifications that are taken in uncritically. Opinions on this vary, of course.

But the worst of these failure modes has nothing on bullshit like women being attacked for not being feminist in the right away or doxxing people for making fun of you or mounting giant harassment campaigns against the designated target of the week. And bundling criticism of these things together is costly.

Because the non-abusive, non-bullying SJ types are not going to stand around and listen when you make fun of them for having weird identity issues they resolve the best they know how, with the tools their community gives them. And alienating the people with weird pronouns who don't hurt anybody is a loss. Because, well, they don't hurt anybody, and other people in their movement do, and we want them to help minimise that harm. If their idea of "SJ-critic" is "those assholes who made fun of me and my friends because of our gender" then why would they want to side with them? Why would they want to listen when we talk about toxic norms in their community? We are the enemy, after all.

Sorry, this came out more ranty than it should.

[Ultimate Paragon]

[ironbite]

He's not wrong.

[Ultimate Paragon]

He's not wrong.

Yes he is.  According to the FBI, 21.4 percent of racially-motivated hate crimes in 2013 stemmed from anti-white bias.

As for police brutality, in 2014, more whites than blacks were killed by cops.  Do you really think every single one of those deaths was justified?