"Neckbeards vs Legbeards": Or, Social Justice Extremism

I’ve noticed something from about quite a bit of time in “social justice” communities. A bit of a guilty pleasure for me, it fascinates me to see why people pick the targets they do and what their ideas for how to “fix” these problems exist. That’s ultimately their goal, right? Fix a perceived or real inequality?
 
Let me just tell you, some of these stereotypes couldn’t be more on point. It’s all the same. Regardless of the community, they choose to spend most of their time “enlisting” people for their cause. The biggest thing that usually comes out of this is propaganda, often very cutesy stuff that gets passed around in various places. Often, attempts to donate to charities are admonished as supposed negative behavior is “found.” Attention must be paid to the community, and keeping the community strong.
 
I don’t know what the solution for this is, but honestly? I’m not sure if it matters. The few scenes I’ve seen of these types in public show why they take towards such extremist viewpoints to begin with: they don’t know how to act around people, or at least in a way that most would find reasonable.
 
“Policing” extremists won’t work. All you can do as a moderate is push them to the fringes and talk about how they’ve got it wrong. Just some random thoughts. I don’t even know what triggered (heh) this.

Yep. Mock them, and don’t ever engage or give them a forum. Don’t let them get a foothold or any kind of moderation power anywhere, or they’ll take over like a cancer.
 
Most importantly, don’t put up with anyone who associates with them, especially in business or government, or you’ll soon find yourself living under laws and policies written by people like Andrea Dworkin.

These people have always been around. Let them rant and ramble and (attempt) to assemble. Until they get out of that computer chair, go outside, spend some time and money understanding law, philosophy, and breaking into politics, they aren’t changing shit.

The problem is that they’ve actually got a foothold in some of those places.
 
I have a horrible suspicion that if we ignore them, they’ll end up running our conventions, our student unions, our human resource departments… and eventually our governments.
 
Their ideology is completely out of touch with reality, but the more control they get, the more they can spend huge amounts of other people’s money to warp reality–or at least the public’s perception of it.  
When they can appropriate your tax money for “Ministries of Integration and Gender Equality”, Reklamombudsmannen, and propaganda agencies disguised as “research foundations”, it’s amazing how much harm they can do, even without popular support.

Ignoring them isn’t the answer. The answer is to minimize them, to push them to the fringe where they belong.

That kind of people are the ones ruling our country at this very moment.
 
Its like this:
 
They run the goverment. If you say something against their way of ruling, then you are a country-seller (vende-patria, which means to sell or take away stuff from your country to give it to other countries), golpista (someone who wants to put down the government, a full coup d’État), or someone who is a bad person altogether.  
This kind of behavior has made a rift in our country, divided between those who support the government and those who don’t, effectively destroying friendships and taking favoritism in everything.
 
If they do something wrong, they blame the others (economy groups who want to see the country up in flames, the citizens themselves, anyone actually). Some people are so brainwashed that they believe everything the government says, to the point of self-destruction.
 
To give you an idea: The government made sure that when people retire, they get a miserable amount of money in compensation for all the years they have been working. Its barely enough to survive for a month, not without help from your family.  
Now, these idiots (the actual government) destroyed the economy, literally ensuing that many people in the future don’t even GET the monthly retirement money they are supposed to get. And worst of all? Even the ones that support the government don’t even see anything wrong with this. In fact, they are happy!
 
This is a nation of fools.

Nah, this is just slacktivism.
 
In fact, “activists” like the kind that I’m talking about are loved by people who actually do shit.

@SocDev  
Off topic, but Argentina nationalised (stole) all private pensions in the country when it ran out of money to pay for the public pensions, didn’t it?
 
God, what a mess that’s going to be to fix.

I’m posting this panel from a comic being spread around Tumblr because it is both true and relevant to us:
 

 
I am not posting it on the board however, because I don’t want to.
 
 
Read the whole thing here.

@Itsthinking  
It will appear here sooner or later.
 
It’s sad that this is not even exaggeration. I’ve seen those sentences before, almost word-by-word. Except “kill all men”, but there’s probably some who say that.

@Grieffon  
I was going to say that’s an exaggeration, but I’ve seen similar statements myself. Especially among the groups that encourage vigilantism.

@Grieffon
 
Maybe you oughta look a bit harder.

@And Brother I Hurt People  
You know, half of these people aren’t helping the (very old, I might add) stereotype that women are only feminists because they can’t get men. Ironically, that’s something that they throw back at the people who disagree with them.
 
It is comforting to see some people calling out bullshit in that tag, though. Like, I’m seeing more than I expected to.

@Itsthinking
 
I don’t know if Tumblr’s exactly the best representation of feminism out there. It’s not exactly a secret that most of the userbase is teenage girls, and they just don’t have the experience in the real world to know that a lot of what they’re spewing is bullcrap. Are there problems out there that need to be tackled? Yes. Abuse rates, wage gaps, abortion rights being denied, rape…those are all things that need to be stopped. So how the hell is yelling “white male tears!!” going to solve anything?
 
Short answer: it doesn’t.
 
I mean, on one hand, I admire their concern for the world. Young girls who care about the problems of the world they’re going to inherit? Great. But again, they lack the experience to know how to solve it.

@And Brother I Hurt People  
And most of the info they give on those issues is dishonest

They’re doing nothing but wasting time and saying things that they’ll likely regret in 5-10 years.
 
Going to inherit? Ehhhhhh….I’m not so sure. For all of their talk, these just don’t seem like the kind of people who can handle the world as it is.

@Whatevs  
Or just plain bad. I’ve been linked to undergraduate papers from the mid-90s about topics that they want to support, and in response to stuff from peer-reviewed journals. I mean I look at everything with a skeptical lens, but you cannot expect me to look at something like an undergrad paper seriously.
 
and I say that as a college student. Fuck, I wouldn’t want anyone using my papers in an online argument, they’re not good.

@And Brother I Hurt People  
I really doubt there are many who actually cares about the world and not just want to sit on the holier-than-thou pedestal.

@Grieffon  
The ones who genuinely care aren’t spending all of their time on Tumblr drawing cutesy propaganda and responding to “haters” with sassy .gifs.

@Grieffon
 
That’s the thing; I’m almost positive that these people do think they genuinely care. They don’t know that they should be doing more, being more active. I mean, it’s not like they have any real life experience to know that they’re doing the bare minimal.
 
I’m going to try to equate it to owning a pet. Let’s say you buy a guinea pig, and do shit research on how to take care of it. You have no idea that they’re supposed to eat hay daily, because while you should have been a decent human being and looked online to see how to feed them, you just took your friend’s advice and fed them apple all the time. You clean the cage once every three weeks, when you’re supposed to clean it once a week, put newspaper in their cage as a bedding as opposed to real guinea pig bedding, etc. You truly think that you’re doing everything to help the animal. When in fact it’s dying because you fucked it its digestion system by not feeding it hay. Doesn’t make you a great person for not researching that pet, of course, but you just don’t know any better.
 
Yeah, that probably made no sense. Sorry, I’m trying to explain my reasoning here.

@And Brother I Hurt People  
The problem is these people see the guinea pig gets sick or angry, but blame the pet instead of themselves.
 
They just never consider the possibility “maybe I’m wrong”. And as the result, they never listen, and never know better.

@Grieffon
 
Oh, yeah, never said that didn’t happen.
 
…I feel like I should make political cartoons.

Okay, got another analogy for you people:
 
Let’s say you’re the owner of a brewery. There is a very strong movement within the place where you do business to ban alcoholic beverages completely. However, there is also a movement to promote responsible drinking that says prohibition will just cause more problems. You don’t particularly like the leader of this movement, even though they hold no ill will towards you in principle.
 
Obviously, you’ve got to have a position in this. Now, what if you chose to support the people who wanted complete prohibition because you disliked the leader of the moderation movement?
 
My original analogy is much more simple, could explain it if people care.

@Itsthinking
 
“ but you cannot expect me to look at something like an undergrad paper seriously.”
 
I’ve seen some pretty well written undergrad stuff, quite a bit of it published before some of these students have even hit their 3rd year. Don’t assume just because these twats use bogus papers that every undergrad paper is poorly conceived.
 
Judge them for the sources they use, not every source. Or, since we’re in analogy mode. Just because their spring is full of shit, don’t assume every river begins in a sewage plant.

@Zincy  
I’m just saying when someone brings in a peer-reviewed journal into the argument, you’ve kind of got to step it up. Maybe it’s just my own self-criticism that would keep me from taking an undergrad paper seriously, I don’t know. It didn’t help that they were trying to talk about an issue that changes rapidly and the paper was from 1995. Plus, being peer-reviewed makes it a much more reputable resource.
 
Is that panel already on here? I know for some reason stuff that I find but try to keep off the gallery itself usually ends up there eventually…