briandanielwolf:

Makes me wonder how many of those SJW posts floating around are actually from assholes trying to poison the well…

I think it’s one of the especially interesting and also frightening products of this sort of echo chamber mentality on social media, you get a lot of very young people who are just being exposed to social equality movements for the first time so they’re trying to figure out what’s socially acceptable by following the herd. This is just how people learn, and you see it in every occupation and subculture, new inductees slavishly follow the example and advice of other community members until they gain enough experience to think for themselves in regards to the subject. So someone says a radical, offensive thing for the sake of discrediting a movement they don’t like, a lot of people without the experience to know better kind of Emperor’s-New-Clothes it and go with the flow, and you end up with this agitated hive of people defending this statement that was originally meant to be a troll remark to discredit them until they calm down and think about what they’re actually saying (or in more unfortunate cases, get even more riled up and defensive because they’ve been publicly embarrassed)

People point to this as a failing of “social justice warriors” but it permeates absolutely every social group. Art students who are hypercritical of every tiny error in every cartoon and comic they see, fledgeling fitness buffs who think anyone who doesn’t follow the same routine and diet they had suggested to them “might as well be doing nothing”, 12 year olds on Xbox Live trying to trash talk like the sexist, racist adults they hear. Students with one semester of Psychology classes trying to psychoanalyze their families, lawyers-to-be trying to score every personal debate by strict scholarly rhetoric standards. It’s giving people this new toolkit of knowledge, and they’re not really sure yet how to use anything in it so they’re trying to fake it until they make it.

It’s not entirely negative, because these people really badly want to learn and fit in with their communities, the challenge is a matter of giving them the tools to think critically about what they hear and understand which voices are bad influences.

(Source: maxofs2d)