As Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy.” We can no longer refer to “Liberals” as being, well, liberal. They are manifestly showing themselves to be extremely illiberal and totalitarian. Demanding that everyone thinks and lived according to their senses of some dystopia Utopia.
Related: ‘Wokeness is Being Pushed on Everyone’
I’m going to try to post as much as I find on the topic of Social Justice Warriors and how they think. I do believe that it is an evil that has gone well past “equal opportunity for all” to an all-out war of “equal results by racial quota/socioeconomic/Critical Race Theory/Marxist Divisional Ideology demands” that have no place in a Freedom-centric Society.
In fact, that last part, Freedom-centric, is an evil unto itself by these moronic ideologues that truly believe “Freedom” is oppressive.
Yeah, go figure. I chuckle every time I go over to Sarah Hoyt’s site (I know her from Instapundit where she adds to Glenn’s site) and look at her header and it’s not for the pretty chick holding a Blaster in her left hand:
But the tagline as well:
Taking over the world and leaving it ruthlessly alone
Wouldn’t that be the BEST Libertarian line EVAH? Conquer everyone and then let them do what they want anyway. Or, enforce a system in which the “conquered” can do whatever they want to anyway. As opposed to people like Selfish Socialist Andru Volinsky who has plans, if he gains the NH Governorship, on how we will all live, or Slightly Less Selfish Socialist Dan Feltes who is going to demand pretty much the same things, only fewer of them and less intensity. Both, however, have not a single scintilla of the idea that we get to choose for ourselves and not them.
Sidenote: Democrats have certainly morphed into the idea that elected Representatives are now either minor king-lets or Major Kings (depending on the office) that get to tell the rest of us what to do. If you doubt me, when’s the last time any of them said “go do what you want, we’ll just be the “Government as the umpire and you figure it out as a Civil Society without us”?
Oh, back to what I was saying: there, I hope I’ve now ticked off the Feminazis (“pretty chick”), the Civilian Disarmament Anti-Constitutionalists (possessing a “blaster” – a REAL “fire” arm), and the Totalitarian SJWs (“leaving it ruthlessly alone”). None of those groups have any sense of humor and I hope I’ve made their Monday morning so they can wet themselves in their own tears. The problem, as John Lindsey describes it, is not just the chasm of how the Left is different than the Right but that the Left has adopted a “religious attitude” such that any of their precepts are above any discussion at all as to their meanings, applications, or that other people hold ideas counter to them.
In fact, we (falling into the “heretic” groupings) must be slain like when the Muslims burst out from the Middle East and starting to take over from Christianity (yes, real history unlike the “Project 1619” being foisted upon us all whereby America was founded when the first slave ships arrived and not in 1776 when we broke off being a British Colony; but I digress). Their Narrative must stand along and be unattacked – so they attack. I’ll abstract a bit from his post (reformatted, emphasis mine) as he says it far better than I can and you need to know this…
especially those of you on the Left whom I’ve come to know that you’ve got the talking points down but not your fundamental Hobbesian political philosophy:
There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.
Translation: there will be no debate. Assimilate or (culturally, philosophically, politically, or in the case of the Woke’s brownshirts called Antifa, literally) die.
1. They Think the System Is Rigged Against Them
The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world. In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases,” and this is such a profound departure from how the rest of us—broadly, liberals—think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this.<snip>
Critical pedagogy begins from a different set of assumptions rooted in the neo-Marxian literature on critical theory commonly associated with the Frankfurt School. Here, the critical learner is someone who is empowered and motivated to seek justice and emancipation. Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities. Its mission is to teach students ways of identifying and mapping how power shapes our understandings of the world.
I’ve talked about the “chasm” idea before – the above puts meat on the bone, so to speak. I really do believe that there can be NO compromise between Freedom and this urge to change everything because of their “Savior mentality”. There can be no tinkering at the edges – they believe only a wholesale destruction and rebuilding of America can “save” us. Why else can you even consider what is going on in Portland or Seattle (Oregon) as part of the struggle when the elected representatives (Democrats all) are part and parcel of the almost 80 days of rioting, the same issues in LA, Denver, NYC, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston and NYC? Civil War II or Luther’s Reformation gone wild (or to crap, depending on your religious/political worldview).
Power over Truth. The Western Enlightenment was about the struggle to determine what Truth, being Objective, was and is. Postmodernism holds that there is nothing that can be Objective, only Subjective and Critical Theory is use to so deconstruct every iota of our foundational beliefs that nothing is left. What remains is MY truth which isn’t the same as YOUR Truth – which locks in that there can be no common ground. No common ground means there can be no unity on anything. What remains is only Power – and that is what the Marxist craves at all costs.
Everything else is collateral damage until they capture, hold, and wield it. Think I’m kidding? Take a long careful look at how the Democrats are talking about this upcoming election.
…That is, they can’t reorder society in the radical way they deem necessary. The belief, as both scholars explain in different ways, is that to play by the existing rules (like conversation and debate as a means to better understand society and advance truth) is to automatically be co-opted by those rules and to support their legitimacy, beside one deeper problem that’s even more significant.
The deeper, more significant aspect of this problem is that by participating in something like conversation or debate about scholarly, ethical, or other disagreements, not only do the radical Critical Social Justice scholars have to tacitly endorse the existing system, they also have to be willing to agree to participate in a system in which they truly believe they cannot win. This isn’t the same as saying they know they’d lose the debate because they know their methods are weak. It’s saying that they believe their tools are extremely good but not welcome in the currently dominant system, which is a different belief based on different assumptions. Again, their game is not our game, and they don’t want to play our game at all; they want to disrupt and dismantle it.
While both checkers and chess are played on the same board, the pieces are different and the rules are different. You cannot map one game to the other. What does that end up doing?
The board itself, even as it looks the same for both games, changes. It is fundamentally different for one than it is for the other as the physical spots on the board can be great for one game and utterly destructive for winning the game in the other. This is what is being exploited and if you don’t understand my long-standing description of the GOP (Marquese of Queensbury boxing rules) vs the Democrats/Socialist (MMA – Mixed Martial Arts), hopefully, this one will.
…Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place.
This is why I say we are orthogonal in worldview – they never do or can meet in some type of compromise. And because of the above outlook, they don’t care what we think. At all. Just ask Bruce Currie – while our current Socialist does try to engage, it is a curious sort in that he’ll attack what we say, his approaches are above reproach. VERY seldom (though it does happen every once in a while) is there any agreement – which is why we all then type in responses in amazement.
…Therefore, you’ll find them resistant to engaging in debate because they fully believe that engaging in debate or other kinds of conversation forces them to do their work in a system that has been rigged so that they cannot possibly win, no matter how well they do. They literally believe, in some sense, that the system itself hates people like them and has always been rigged to keep them and their views out. Even the concepts of civil debate (instead of screaming, reeeee!) and methodological rigor (instead of appealing to subjective claims and emotions) are considered this way, as approaches that only have superiority within the dominant paradigm, which was in turn illegitimately installed through political processes designed to advance the interests of powerful white, Western men (especially rich ones) through the exclusion of all others. And, yes, they really think this way.
For adherents to Critical Social Justice Theory, then, there’s just no point to engaging in conversation or debate with people with whom they disagree. They reject the premise that such a thing is possible at all, because what is discussed or debated are, if changeable, in some sense matters of opinion. They don’t see the world this way at all, though. “Racism is not a matter of opinion” is, after all, one of their thought-stopping mantras. For them, disagreements across a stratifying axis of social power are a matter of being, experience, reality, and even life and death. These are not matters to be debated; they’re far too important for that.
One reason why Zandra Rice-Hawkins and other notable NH based Progressives refuse to debate us – it comes down to the knowledge (on their part) that we are beneath them. From a Party that preaches tolerance and openness, it’s hardly even window dressing. They realize that they have to say something in the public domain but they do realize, at some level, that most people have no idea of the slight of verbal hand that is going on beneath what we used to consider common ideas and language.
I’ve gone long, way long, but go read the rest of it (again, here). IT IS IMPORTANT. Especially this one – it starts to explain a lot since all of us People of Pallor have already been labeled as RAACISTS!!!!
4. Guilt by Association with Racists
Fourthly, the Critical Social Justice view sees people who occupy positions of systemic power and privilege and yet who refuse to acknowledge and work to dismantle them, to the full satisfaction of the Critical Social Justice Theorists, to be utterly morally reprehensible. They are racists. They are misogynists. They hate trans people and want to deny their very existence. They are bigots. They are fascists. They are “literal” Nazis. Not only that, they are willfully so, and their main objective is to defend and spread their hateful ideology in the world
Sound familiar? It also explains the new epithet of the Left that if you aren’t an ANTIracist, you ARE a racist. If you remain silent (e.g., just want to sit this one out), you are COMPLICIT and thus guilty. You’re STILL a RAACIST! And this is used for everything in their world view. Assimilate or Die.
Boy, was Erick Erickson prescient: You will be made to care.
You WILL be forced to choose a side
(H/T: New Discourses via Hot Air)
