@DiscoRodeo @Frank D'arbo @Salubrious @The Curmudgeon
I used to consider myself pretty left-wing a decade ago. I didn’t like the wars in the Middle East, full stop. I didn’t think it was proportionate retribution to kill and displace hundreds of thousands of people and create failed states over 9/11. I don’t blame our servicemen at all. Some progressives did, calling them baby-killers and other bullshit. That's not fair at all. I blame our politicians and propagandists. Those assholes sent America’s children to get maimed and killed in the sandbox for nothing. For no one’s benefit. Back then, Wikileaks was the darling of the Left because Julian Assange consistently dug up dirt on warmongers. Remember that?
Then, around the early 2010s, a funny thing happened. The Democrats had been in power for a couple years. It looked like troop drawdowns were going to happen after the OBL raid. After all, they got their man, or so it seemed. The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street happened concurrently. OWS was genuine WTO-riot-style, alt-globalist, populist, grassroots resistance to Wall Street that was rapidly subverted with “progressive stack” ideology that I’d never quite seen before, and didn’t recognize on sight. The Arab Spring, on the other hand, was a demonstrably fake color revolution incited by Western NGOs carrying out acts of what were basically espionage against foreign countries. Obama deliberately defunded the anti-war movement. After all, there were more Arabs to kill for no discernible reason.
It was bewildering. Obama went back on basically all of his campaign promises, started even more wars in the sandbox in spite of a Nobel Peace Prize that he did not deserve, and no one had the balls to say anything about it because he was a black president, and therefore, of the sanctified melanin. It dawned on me, right about then, that this new progressivism would sanction any government excess so long as rainbow flags were painted on the noses of the JDAMs and Hellfires. I found myself agreeing with the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore more often than not. I had a rather single-minded focus on foreign policy and class divisions that occasionally dipped into a conspiratorial view of our government as a criminal racket. This alienated me from every single one of my liberal and progressive friends, who all believed in big government and whined that anything else was libertarian heresy.
But the real breaking point for me was literature. See, I had old-school progressive ideas about narrative fiction. Namely, that authors had a fundamental right to depict basically whatever the fuck they liked, even very transgressive things, and to be criticized on the storytelling merits of their choices fairly. SJWs, on the other hand, practice a thing they call “cultural criticism”, which actually isn’t criticism at all, but a witch-hunt straight out of the Malleus Maleficarum. Imagine being me, around 2013. Imagine not knowing what SJWs even are, really, and then wading into a conversation on fucking narrative fiction where you declare that authors have a right to be as transgressive as they like, and that A Clockwork Orange, Blood Meridian, and The Turner Diaries all counted as literature. Suddenly, I found myself in a vicious struggle session where dozens of people were gaslighting and insulting me and telling me in no uncertain terms that I was Satan’s head and torso grafted onto Hitler’s arms and legs. I tried explaining to them that Anita Sarkeesian was a hack and her criticism of video game narratives could be easily dismantled as reflecting her own weird pacifist Carol Gilliganite ideas on gender, and that if she had her way, we would have no cool tomboy action heroines because action heroines solve their problems with
violence. This, of course, devolved into an argument where I found myself defending the concept that violence was the root of all power and quoting Heinlein to make my case. At that point, they brought out the torches and the crucifix for a good old-fashioned KKK-style lynching. GamerGate happened a year later. I was supportive of GGers for how they pilloried Sarkeesian and her ilk, but mostly stayed on the sidelines.
Ever since then, I have studied SJWs for years and years.
SJWs believe that foreign policy and class divisions don't actually matter insofar as they deal strictly with those things and nothing else. According to SJW thought, it is more important to examine the way that these things touch upon ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, a.k.a. Intersectionality. This, in turn, poisons literally every conversation about war, class, and class wars. It is impossible for an SJW to admit that there are poor white people who have dealt with homelessness and opioid abuse. They're white, straight, and male. They're the powerful ruling class. They can't ever be a victim of anything. Likewise, it is impossible for an SJW to admit that Islamic nutcases stone women for promiscuity and defenestrate gays. They're brown. They're
Eastern and thus
Other. They're oppressed. Never mind that our governments are the ones who oppressed them by blowing up their homes and driving them across the Mediterranean into Europe. They're Refugees. NATO and the international investment banker mafia didn't make them homeless. They have no country of origin, see? They just materialized out of the fucking ether, and now you have to treat them nicely even when they refuse to assimilate and behead people in the street or shoot up cartoon studios for depicting the Prophet.
They believe works of fiction should be picked apart for being politically incorrect or not providing the correct role models and Aesops to their oh-so-impressionable audiences, or, hell, even using the wrong
words to say something. This struck me as very Christian-Fundie of them, because I was old enough to remember when Evangelicals whined about Doom and Postal and South Park and the like. Moreover, I thought it was ridiculous that you couldn't even write a real villain anymore. In SJW fiction, villains can't even be evil or do bad things. You can't depict traumatizing experiences because you might traumatize or offend your audience, or something. Grimdarkness is bad because it depicts politically-incorrect and traumatizing things. Never mind that the majority of people who read and write that kind of thing are often people who are dealing with serious trauma themselves and use it for therapy.
They think that the identity of a speaker has some bearing on the truth of their words. The term they use for this is "lived experience", as if to imply that it's a form of expert knowledge. Since SJWism comes from academia, naturally, these people fellate experts and treat them as a priestly caste and have no idea how to do research on their own. Needless to say, this viewpoint is fundamentally medieval in nature and has nothing at all to do with Enlightenment ideals. Knowledge is knowledge. It doesn't matter who it comes from. The speaker's identity does not fucking matter. If the sky is blue, and you say the sky is blue, then your skin color, sexuality, gender, et cetera, should not come into the equation at all. Facts are facts.
Wait, I should amend that. SJWs often argue that facts aren't facts, actually. According to SJWs, we should ignore statistics and scientific findings that are ideologically inconvenient. Paradoxically, given their habit of vigorous expert-fellating, they will go as far as to engage in blatant denial of science if it doesn't agree with their viewpoint. They will go as far as to state that we should "decolonize science" by removing rigid Western white male viewpoints from it and allowing tribal witch doctors to be raised up on the same pedestal as real science and medicine. Remember, kiddies; math is racist, and numbers aren't real. Ontology doesn't actually matter to an SJW. Any conversation with an SJW on the topic will quickly devolve into name-calling, despite the fact that their entire ideology relies on a kind of dogmatic anti-realism based around ignoring any aspect of reality that causes them even the slightest discomfort.
They believe that Orwellian cognitive dissonance on the level of 2+2=5 should not just be a side effect of being an SJW, it should be actively practiced to reinforce one's beliefs. Progressives in my day cared immensely about government abuses. They cared about Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, and the CIA's torture practices and shady history of drug-smuggling. They cared about the IMF and World Bank impoverishing people with SAPs. They cared about corporate colonialism and the Fortune 500 ripping natural wealth out of third-world countries and dumping toxic waste along Africa's coasts. SJWs don't give a fuck what the government does to people so long as the government performs the correct SJW-appeasing rituals. Governments have cynically latched onto this as a Pavlovian control technique. And, of course, since SJWs arise out of academia, they are already indoctrinated in the modern bureaucratic cult and their critiques of it are ineffectual as a result. These people are so brainwashed with racial dogmas, any attempt to criticize the government is now seen as indulgence in right-wing conspiracy theories, and any attempt to criticize the international investment banker cartels and their wealth-stripping and parasitical usury is regarded as antisemitism. You see how this works? Powerful people go totally unpunished for the abuses they inflict on the masses, when they have idiotic SJW bootlicks to protect them. SJWs would happily return us all to feudalism and make us all serfs, so long as the feudal lords at least
pretend to be steeped in LGBT and racial sensitivity culture.
Lastly, SJWs believe in doing whatever gives them a hit of dopamine. They are pretend altruists par excellence. The rush of collective approval makes them high. They are addicts. The gamification of the internet, with likes, retweets, reblogs, hearts, stickers, upvotes, downvotes, negrates, and report nanny buttons, has destroyed real debate involving controversial ideas. Now, people just say whatever they think will garner them more approval from the local echo chamber. Over the past twenty years, I have watched the internet balkanize into hyper-polarized cliques. No one actually talks to people who hold contrary views anymore. They actively shun, shame, and deplatform each other, because they would rather defend their pitiful egos than actually challenge their minds. And the deplatforming. Oh, the deplatforming. At first, it was just banning people they marked as deplorables from their communities. Then, it was supporting and encouraging major social media giants to go along with their witch-hunts, too. Now, it's okay when Stripe, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa debank and deplatform people in SJW-land. That's not a corporate limitation on free speech, because you're violating their terms of use.
Just make your own banks. Just make your own internet. Lol, fuck your freeze peach, lolbertarian shitlord.
I didn't leave the Left. These crazy cocksuckers pushed me out with both hands.
Corporations back them and repeat their mind-numbing drivel, either out of a cynical attempt to court progressive customers, or because these corporations are increasingly staffed by these smooth-brain fucking drooling koala bear people. God, I had a Grammarly subscription briefly, because I thought it would help with fiction writing (dealing with pointless wordiness and adverb abuse, mostly; I don't really need it, I am my own editor). I tried having a character say "cocksucker" in dialogue, and then Grammarly warned me that this was parochial and offensive. Guess what, Grammarly? Fuck you worthless cocksuckers.
Never forget what the SJWs really serve, which is the corporate-jargon, HR-lingo neoliberal bureaucrat RationalWiki deboonker axis that is sucking every last drop of humanity out of our species at an alarming rate and allowing governments to literally rape, torture, murder, and impoverish people with impunity.
