Internationally the position of women is still highly oppressed, and so the SJW movement still has an important place. It is just that it also a tendency to be blinkered and dogmatic, but in any case is certainly better than rabid ultra-conservatism.
Like anything I think it's just a matter of taking the good and leaving the bad.
Hi bigmantings, I wanted to give you a proper response to your comment because in many ways your opinion here was the target of my article. Here’s why: I almost completely agree with everything you write, bar one critical part – and that part, I believe, changes everything. Yes, around the world women find themselves in various states of oppression, and this absolutely must be tackled. I’m not sure I can draw a distinction between ‘blinkered and dogmatic’ and ‘rabid ultra-conservative’ as they seem the same to me, but I think I know what you’re getting at, perhaps kind of ‘their heart’s in the right place’, compared to ‘they are heartless in principle’ – but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
However, here’s my point: the SJW is explicitly a ‘warrior’ mentality – fighting the good fight perhaps is the intention. A warrior needs an enemy. In this case, the enemy should be bad ideas which support and excuse oppression – but how do you defeat bad ideas? Surely with better ones… Is closing down conversations – censorship – ever going to defeat bad ideas? Is name calling, shaming, getting people fired, ridicule – all the all-too-usual SJW tactics – going to achieve this? And what about the violence of Antifa – how is that directed against bad ideas, how is that putting forward better arguments?
Here’s what I think has happened, and it is kind of tragic: instead of focusing on bad ideas, SJW’s focus on what they consider ‘bad people’, in the naïve belief that destroying the people will destroy the ideas they think they represent. At the same time, SJW’s pride themselves on their inclusivity – so ‘attacking’ the ideas of people in other countries, other parts of the world, is racism, cultural imperialism, etc, etc. And of course physically attacking or ridiculing those same ‘foreigners’ in the same manner they do to the ‘enemy’ in their own societies is similarly unthinkable. Yet, as my article argues, here in the ‘liberal’ (classical sense) West, these arguments are won, and SJW’s are chasing shadows, looking for ‘permitted’ targets, basically anyone with the temerity to disagree with them. So here is where I have to disagree with you – there is no important place for SJW thinking and activity, either here, or elsewhere in the world, because they are doing absolutely nothing to tackle the oppression they claim to despise – they are actually pushing their own insidious version of it, and utterly ignoring the all too real and appalling abuses happening around the world right now. I’m sure the Kingdom of Saud is all too happy to encourage Antifa and SJW’s in the West, they are no threat to such genuine medieval abominations whatsoever. The sooner SJW’s grow up, the sooner our real full energies can focus on the real solutions to the oppressions and evils of this world, but as of now, sadly, they are part of the problem, not a solution. Thank you so much for reading and responding to my article. Db