Great article on the current state of the world and its dismal prospects if millennial’s brand of social justice is allowed to continue. HT/ illustr8r
…Zerlina Maxwell suggests that we should generally write the equivalent of a blank check to someone who comes forward with a rape accusation. This is not justice and it certainly is not social justice either. It is an illiberal perversion of the justice system.
To speak dissent against— or even question at all — the orthodoxy is to have your words twisted into less positive terms: one does not ask for “due process,” one asks to let rapists go, perpetuates rape culture, and favors rape apology.
Instead of the discussion being focused on how advocating to “kill all white people” as a political statement or how the hashtag #KillAllMen are prejudicial and hateful sentiments, the millennial social justice advocate excuses and legitimizes these phrases and behaviors by suggesting that they are not racist or sexist but are legitimate expressions against their oppressors. The discussion of how legitimately hateful and anti-liberal these statements are does not ever surface because, as the script goes, this is “derailing” discussions of legitimate problems of oppressed people to focus on the non-problems of oppressors.
The problem with this brand of modern social justice advocacy is that who one is as a person (race, class, gender, etc.) is the be all and end all of their capacity to have a certain viewpoint. A millennial social justice advocate can discount an opinion simply because it is said or written by a group they feel oppresses them.
The version of millennial social justice advocacy that I have spoken about — one that uses Identity Politics to balkanize groups of people, engenders hatred between groups, willingly lies to push agendas, manipulates language to provide immunity from criticism, and that publicly shames anyone who remotely speaks some sort of dissent from the overarching narrative of the orthodoxy — is not admirable. It is deplorable. It appeals to the basest of human instincts: fear and hatred. It is not an enlightened or educated position to take. History will not look kindly on this Orwellian, authoritarian pervision of social justice that has taken social media and millennials by storm over the past few years.
Those who need to hear this message will probably respond that I am 1. too privileged to understand 2. tone-policing the oppressed (and that I shouldn’t tell the oppressed how to treat their oppressors) and 3. really just a closet racist/sexist in a liberal’s clothing. I expect these responses — partially because I am so used to having seen this script play out over the last four years at NYU.
But the fact of the matter is — anyone unwilling to engage in productive, open, mutually critical conversations with people they disagree with under the moral protection of liberalism and social justice are not liberals, are not social justice advocates, and are not social justice warriors; they are social justice bullies.
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Aristotelis Orginos
NYC | NYU | B.S., English Education | Writer | ELA Teacher | @AristoNYC
I thought it was a Piece of Sh!t article, written by an ever-so-barely-waking-up-to-thought Leftist, still busy too hand-wringing to see his cognitive dissonance.
It was an apologia to the “good intentions” of the (National)Social Justice movement, lightly criticizing without pointing out the nihilism of it.
The first mistake: In the very first sentence, it started out accepting the premise that inequality was unjust and demanded just correction. F*CK THAT..
I hope this nitwit gets offed by his own before he does any further harm to the rest of us.
There was that moment right after Reagan was elected that I listened to what he was saying, and the light came on. I said “Yeah that hippie bullshit isn’t gonna work”. I pray this generation has that same moment
Interesting that this author cited a couple of times to Orwell’s “1984.” But Orwell’s Big Brother did not believe in anything but power – the apparatus existed only to accumulate and exercise power and control. Orwell never really defined the government leaders as left, right, or somewhere in between because there was no political philosophy except power. The protagonist was a minor bureaucratic functionary who could have just been eliminated, but was broken only because the government could. Furthermore, Big Brother’s exercise of power was frequently irrational and non-sensical, but justice, truth and logic were irrelevant in the pursuit of absolute power, and the ability to force people to believe in the absurd, ridiculous and false, as well as live in fear, was the end result of the exercise of absolute power.
This article seems to be a reaction to the author having been on the wrong side of some leftists using any means possible to exercise power – ostensibly for some sort of “social justice,” but in reality only because they can. But the author, even despite his references to “1984,” still misses the big picture – “social justice,” at least as the author envisions it, can only be theoretically attained through absolute governmental power, and absolute government power will always be abused for the personal ends of those who have that power. The ultimate abuse of absolute power by governments is not theoretical, it is a constant throughout history.
This article was nothing more than sour grapes by a leftist who is now on the lesser rungs of the leftist hierarchy. He can complain all he wants about the balkanization of society or the distortion of facts to support ideological positions, but this is the system he helped create, and he has learned nothing.
gee, such stellar thinking, makes you wonder how they come to understand the fucking marriage equality bullshit.
And yet, we’re still paying these assholes to indoctrinate our children and if that’s not insane what the fuck is?
If you poll 100 young people that were in the military 99 of them will be conservative. Regardless of skin color.
If you poll 100 people that came out of our educational system 99 will be lib.
I wonder if that’s why we are down sizing our military?