Social Justice Limited
Too much of a good thing can be bad. Too much sugar is bad for you. Too much oxygen is even bad for you; the air we breathe is only 21 percent oxygen, 70 percent nitrogen, 1 percent argon and 0.04 percent carbon-dioxide Breathing pure oxygen is generally bad for you and sometimes toxic. The same goes for too much "social justice".
source: Schriever Air Force Base
Reading my posts lately might have cultivated the impression that the political left can do no harm, because I rather unapologetically advocate for leftist politics and often criticize the extreme right or the alt-right. I have good reasons to do this, which you can read about in almost all my posts, so I stand by these criticisms. But... That's not to say that it's all good on my side of the political spectrum. However, much of what is seen as leftist extremism is something different altogether. That's why I put "social justice" between quotation-marks in the introduction.
Let me start by saying that fighting for equality of outcome, or complete equality in any aspect of human existence is bullocks. Putting up quota for workplaces with the intent to perfectly mirror the population is, quite frankly, nonsense. To expect that we can ever be "the same" is a hopeless liberal pipe-dream. But I have yet to meet such liberals in real life. Sure I hear politicians on the left say such nonsense to attract some minority votes here and there, but they are a far cry from what I would call "left" or "liberal". In fact the political left has sold out to the winners in the neoliberal world economy and have forgotten about the people they're supposed to represent in their own back-yard. So when the alt-right object to these policies they think they criticize the left when in fact it's the politicians' corporate masters who want these changes.
I've criticized social justice warring many times in the past, especially when it invades my personal space. The Social justice war goes too far when it tries to rewrite history, not when it defends vulnerable subsections of the population. I get mad at these corporate (not leftist but corporate) social justice warriors when they try to rewrite some of my favorite stories, mess them up completely in fact, for the sole reason of satisfying some social justice norm. Hollywood and television have gone completely mad if you ask me. What's with this explosion of "strong female characters" in franchises that are decades old? James Bond has always been a man, and not one that's known for his political correctness where the opposite sex is involved. He is, good or bad, part of a culture, part of our shared head-canon of western pop-culture. Why do we need a female James Bond all of a sudden? Why not just think of a new agent in her own right, with her own designating number. And make that number higher if that's what you wish, call her agent 008, or 700, or whatever, but don't announce her as a new Bond. You'll lose a large part of your traditional fan-base, a fan-base that would be happy to see one of Bond's female colleagues in action, wouldn't complain if it would turn out to be the best Bond movie ever, or if that female super-agent would turn out to be better than good old James. In other words: don't turn that male icon into a female just to virtue-signal some ill-imagined equality between the sexes. Instead think of a new protagonist that stands on her own legs. Don't give us Batwoman with the same intent, while she just stands on the shoulders of the original, Batman. Don't destroy everything Luke Skywalker stood for over six previous movies, just to shine a light on the new female mirror image.
These are not criticisms against the left though. This is not the result of some dark Marxist plot, but simply capitalism in action. Film studios just want to sell tickets to as wide an audience as possible and got the mistaken idea that putting Asian actors in films helps sell them in the east. They believe that women, who represent 50% of all the potential ticket-buyers, will come streaming in Star Wars and the MCU when they just put more female heroes in their films. And that's not a bad thing in itself even, it's just the way they do it that pisses me off. Today I heard that some actress was playing with the idea of incorporating a female Gandalf the Grey in the newly announced Netflix series... When does this madness end? But it's not leftist madness. Like all things in socioeconomic life, just follow the money. The actual fight for social justice is just fine; there's everything to say for, and nothing to say against protection of the most vulnerable among us and there's nothing wrong with identifying these groups in order to give them that. This is not easy of course, because we also have something called individual responsibility, and weighing the two is an art we're not very good at yet. But there's nothing wrong with the principle of mitigating the injustices perpetrated against certain social groups, however these injustices may have evolved.
To have a rational discussion about these things, it's necessary that both parties at least agree on the existence of social injustice, and that's where the alt-right loses me; their most popular spokespersons simply deny the existence of social injustice. Some of them even turn the tables and assert that white men are being suppressed. They make memes like "White Lifes Matter" and the Male Rights Activists pit themselves against feminists when they should be standing shoulder to shoulder in their fight against the patriarchy: yes, it's true that many of the MRA's legitimate concerns are the result of the same social and cultural pressures that hurt females. Yet, their guru's deny the existence of the patriarchy, which is why MRA's will never get help there. They've completely bought into the neoliberal paradigm of personal responsibility, why I like to call them individualist-fundamentalists; they believe, somehow, that you and you alone are responsible for your lot in life and that you should stop blaming circumstances, and remind you of your equal right to engage in voluntary transactions, like finding a job. According to them we really are that rational agent who makes perfect decisions to maximize personal gains.
But we're not. We're human beings, all of us, and being human is complex; we can love and we can hate, we can be selfish or altruistic, we can be happy or sad, and we even manage both at the same time once in a while, we can protect and we can attack and we're able to mix and match all of this in a single consciousness without going mad. We're miracles. But we've settled for an economic model that rewards selfishness and self-interest alone. We live in an age where the individual is the ultimate arbiter of all truth, and individuals who make it are made to believe they made it all by themselves and their personal circumstances had nothing or very little to do with it. This is such a poor, reductionist world view to have, such an extremist world view to have. It ultimately makes everyone everyone else's competitor and has atomized our society to the extreme, so much so that individuals are now allowed their own "alternative facts" in public discourse.
Social justice CAN go too far though, especially in areas we're just beginning to explore in a public manner, like the whole gender-fluidity discussion. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that this very real phenomenon has been studied and discussed in science only fairly recently. It's clear that sex and gender are not the same and that there's a percentage of the population that identifies as something different than man or woman; genders are not binary, that much is beyond doubt. How to deal with this vulnerable minority is as much a challenge as all other social justice conundrums, but that it IS a vulnerable minority is without question. But how to deal with it? And how to deal with transgender females in sports where results rely heavily on physical strength? That's not so straight forward, as British rapper Zuby proved with a publicity stunt early this year. He tweeted a short clip of himself breaking the British women's record dead-lifting with the text: "I identified as a woman. Don't be bigots!" Now, as much as I'm for fighting against social injustice, this is clearly an instant where hitting the brakes is in order. Maybe we should just make all sports open for all genders and see who joins and see who makes it to the top? That would be unfair to women too. There are no obvious answers here, none that I can think of at least while writing this. I'll leave you with a short interview of Zuby by Ben Shapiro, both neoliberals and both beginning with the alt-right straw-man that says that progressives deny the existence of biological differences between men and women. Besides that though, it perfectly illustrates how social justice could go too far, which is something none of us want. Right?
Ben Shapiro Interviews Zuby on TRANSGENDER Deadlift Record & Rap Music
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Centre leaning post. I like.
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