Social Ignorance Warriors- Bill Reader

In most real-world conflicts, the key to victory lies not on a battlefield, or in any one special strategy or tactic, but inside your opponent’s head. This can be argued for a variety of historical conflicts and, in my experience, holds up pretty well in day-to-day experience. The key to beating back superior British forces in the American revolution wasn’t besting them at their own game. It was, in some sense, making mostly-inevitable losses too painful for the enemy to continue inflicting (that and, as in virtually every battle involving a European county up through at least WWI, leveraging Europe’s constant in-fighting against whatever portion you were currently fighting). The United States never needed to win. It just needed to become too difficult to keep. Likewise, the slum revolts and regional uprisings that, in aggregate, put paid to the Roman Empire, were certainly not the result of masterful tactics. Rather, those revolting recognized that Rome had lost sufficient belief in its own culture to fight to uphold it; had in any case mostly lost the capacity to impose culture in its wholesale importation of anybody and everybody; and probably was afraid of said anybody and everybody because it spent so much bread-and-circus money trying to appease them. Rome had an unparalleled army, but no clear target, only the most bare-bones idea of when to use it, and increasingly limited resources to maintain it.

Such a key exists to the SJWs. And to find it, we must simply look in the mirror, through their eyes. What does an SJW see when they look in the mirror?

What they see is a member of the redeemed. They see a person who has been touched by an enlightenment, a piece of knowledge so great it no longer matters that they have a non-existent knowledge of history, that they avoid considering any subject long enough to have a deeper grasp than “an important person says”, that their day-to-day dealings are superficial, instantaneous and overwhelmingly emotional.

That piece of knowledge is that they are good people.

The wonderful thing about defining yourself as a good person is that, unlike the rest of us unfortunates, you no longer have to act up to it. It’s why the Democratic party as a whole gets knee deep in corruption, intrigue, petty vendettas and sometimes (Ted Kennedy for sure, the Clintons almost certainly) outright murder. Yet those same people will step to the camera on the turning of the sun and say, with that practiced smile, that they want what is best, are doing what is best, are only trying to help. Because they are good people. And good people never have to prove it.

One problem of being a self-defined good person is relative definitions of good. A synonym for the good person might be the ideal, or the model. SJWs have a peculiar flaw in their ideal, however. Due to influence from postmodernism, a liberal cannot take reality as it is. They take reality as they would like it to be. In fact, they pride themselves on this. They believe it makes them capable of envisioning and creating technological and civil revolutions while stodgy conservatives just try to kick through the problems of not having them without aspiring to something better.

In practicality, a person who sees things as they truly are is the person most likely to see through social dogma standing in the way of bettering mankind, for the same reason that successful automotive engineers are unlikely to round pi to 3. A person who lives in a persistent fantasy world is, however, still more likely to feel that they see through social dogma standing in the way of bettering mankind.

For similar reasons, an SJW’s view of themselves as a good person depends, partially, on literally willing the world to be other than it is. This is because the way the world actually is makes them uncomfortable, and the discomfort would require tinkering with or changing certain basic tenets of their worldview. This would seriously affect the Social Justice Warriors’ work of making other people uncomfortable in order to change other people’s worldview (Hi, Starbucks!). Ironically, as with all systems predicated on postmodernism, this is what makes their view of the world a serious threat to itself.

What Social Justice Warriors haven’t quite realized is that, in their eagerness to think the best of everyone, they have acted more like the ignorant strawmen Americans they are committed to fighting than any other actual American ever has. To demonstrate the point, let us lift the veil on some examples in turn.

Possibly the largest cultural example of outright barbarism in the modern world is Islam as it is practiced in most of the Middle East. That is, cliterectomies for young girls, hanging of gays, stoning of “adulterers”, including women who are raped, legal systems based entirely on the Qu’ran, taxation on infidels, and all the rest. Conservatives have asked, repeatedly, why it is that the left is so silent about this issue. After all, feminists here have become so sensitive to slights against women that the signals they respond to are below the noise threshold. The only sure way not to annoy a modern feminist is not to encounter her. Gay groups are less in-your-face, partially because they have proportionally much smaller representation, but certainly just as vocal. Yet the Middle East warrants no more than a yawn?

Metaphorically, the self-proclaimed fellowship of the ring, rather than journeying to mount Doom, decided to go on a witch-hunt for people wearing rings, any rings at all, and has now gotten to the point of attacking on sight anyone seen wearing jewelry. Why?

In a very real way, SJWs do not believe in the Middle East. I don’t mean that they don’t believe in the people of the middle east. Au contraire, they believe they can do anything! Provided it doesn’t require, you know, support or anything, which is why Obama slept through the Green Revolution in Iran— especially incompetent of him, since the Green Revolution offered an opportunity to make a peace with Iran he’s now paying dearly for (I suppose that would have robbed us a chance for our modern Neville Chamberlain to hold aloft a worthless agreement with an untrustworthy scoundrel for a cheering crowd, as I doubt he’ll be able to resist doing. Or, then again, perhaps the key to this repetition of history as farce is that Mr. Chamberlain was merely naive. Mr. Obama might well have been praying the Green Revolution would falter and leave him a chance to make a “historic” deal.).

The problem is that their response to being read accounts of the horrors of Muslim countries, to being shown videos of gays being hanged or pictures of mutilated genitals and broken faces, is to side step, to pretend, to sink further into the fantasy. “It’s not happening”, or “it’s all fake” may quickly be brushed aside by preponderance of videos and accounts. Then comes “it’s just the leaders, not the people”, and so you show the assuredly lowly middle-eastern citizens dancing in the streets and burning the American flag after 9/11. High spirits, eh? And the leaders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and their respective sympathizers, must be very busy people, what with having to run all over their countries personally committing these atrocities every day. At the point you tell them this, you become “racist” and they dismiss you, which Sarah dealt with in detail a few days ago.

We’ve all seen this behavior, but it’s not immediately clear why. Why such resistance to the existence of a problem so obvious, especially from people who live on the opportunity to complain about societal problems?

Fundamentally, they don’t see you as presenting them with reality. They see you as challenging their internal view of the world. But it’s worse than that. It says something about their view of the world that they literally cannot believe these are tenets of another culture. Because, to them, what people in the Middle East mostly believe is what Americans mostly believe. They just believe it in a very wise way available only to those who tan or take Women’s Studies degrees. They don’t actually believe in horrible cultural beliefs because those cultural beliefs are horrible, and that would mean that when they support multiculturalism they support doing horrible things.

But they are good people. And therefore people abroad don’t believe horrible things. They believe all the things that the SJWs believe, except for the parts which don’t really, in a nuts-and-bolts way, matter, like linguistic arrangement and cosmetology.

What. Supreme. Arrogance.

I am not merely taking the piss. This is the fundamental issue with the SJW ideology. They don’t just disagree with people who have an actual different view on life from them. They don’t even acknowledge that these people exist.

They are more disgustingly culturally arrogant than the staunchest supporter of the British Empire. That person may not have agreed with what Indians did as parts of various traditions; may have looked down on them as childlike; may have imposed his own customs on them in the process. He at least had the decency to acknowledge that such beliefs could, in fact, exist.

For an SJW, a world truly outside their own is so alien that it must be disavowed if ever it is claimed to exist, and the person claiming it must be put to shame. And they will help you get outside your comfort zone, so you can discover the only true way of living.

Which brings us to their attitude towards conservatives. It struck me, for a long time, as strange that the vilified concepts of conservatives were fundamentally at odds. The complete picture is a small elite group constituting a vast legion of poor uneducated hick wealthy stockbrokers who care for no moral system at all and are unthinking fundamentalist Christians, obsessed with remaking the whole world in their image and totally disinterested by affairs over the border. For years I wondered what blender of a mind could conceive of this hopeless kludge.

The key is understanding it, however, is the SJW inability to believe in anyone except themselves. You might think that this would make it impossible to even visualize an opponent, but in fact that is not the case. As I said, that is entirely beyond their very limited world. Asked to conjure a conservative, they imagine what you would come up with if I told you to conceptualize your evil twin. That is, they imagine people with all of their basic skills and tastes, but with a deliberate desire to do the wrong thing.

To be clear, this person is still, in all ways, them. It’s just a “them” that makes all the choices they consider to be bad. And this figment, consequently, also believes the choices to be bad while making them.

If an SJW finds themselves very rich, it’s most often by the Al Gore approach of trading on the same disaster or phobia you happen to be the prophet of. It is not, however, usually within their means. It takes exceptional charisma and a skill for politics. Most SJWs, like most people, have a certain range of skills they know how to trade on and believe they are using them as best they can. Is this belief true? Usually it’s almost certainly not. I’ve witnessed the amazing malleability of people over the years. Most internal limitations people believe they have are self-imposed habits of mind, and most extraordinary achievements of any kind come from people changing those mental habits. This, however, does not enter into the reflection of an SJW. They see no way of vectoring for the extreme fortunes that they hear about without cheating on an extraordinary scale.

They know nothing of how companies are run and hence do not believe a CEO’s work could be worth a multi-million dollar salary. They have no idea that value can be created, and try to avoid selling anything solid or doing anything productive, preferring regulation as the “purer” career. Hence, they see the wealthy merchant or manufacturer as a large-scale con-artist. They equate conservatism with these things because they don’t know how they could achieve wealth through any of these means except by “cheating” in some vaguely defined way. But they are good, mostly upper-middle class people, or the close relatives thereof.

Consequently, by weight of numbers alone, the “correct” mode of life has become that of the upper middle class, with the very wealthy automatically becoming bad by right of being something besides what most SJWs are.

On the other hand, if they were poor and living in a trailer park, they’d try to fix it. The only way they wouldn’t is if they couldn’t. Obviously, then, the poor aren’t truly poor. They’re people who ought to be upper middle class. That they aren’t and presumably want to be can only be attributed to some outside force preventing their income from changing. What outside force precisely, they cannot agree on. Certainly it can’t be giving people enough free money not to have to actually escape poverty. They love being given free money, but are pretty sure, in themselves, that if you gave them free money they’d still try to escape poverty.

They’ve almost never actually had to do this experiment, you understand, but they’ve thought about it and it would make lots of sense. The only exception to this logic is poor conservatives. Poor conservatives are poor because they’re so stupid they’d believe what conservatives say. And let us recall the SJW view of conservatives as, essentially, evil demons.

A person incapable of seeing the superiority of the liberal worldview is literally a person incapable of differentiating right and wrong to them, a creature barely above the level of an animal. What could anyone hope to do for someone like that? Their circumstances cannot be what they are because they do not aspire to or make any movement to achieve a normal middle class lifestyle. It cannot be because they bet big, or are betting big, on a plan to become very rich, and it has not yet panned out. Everyone wants to get a normal dayjob and live a normal, upper-middle class lifestyle. Because that’s what they want, and they’re good people.

The belief about the world makes their world. Their judgments about others proceed from it. Even the fact that they never actually see anything they do as being wrong is extended onto those they consider on their side. That’s largely why they reflexively defend any person from one of their protected interest groups, treating the actual facts of the case as background noise. If they were accused of a crime, why, they are good people. Obviously they would be innocent.

Obviously, therefore, when their distant allies are accused of any crime, they are reflections of good people and must be innocent. Anyone saying otherwise must have a personal vendetta, because only evil (syn. conservative) people go after good people. And any facts to the contrary must be lies, half truths, or distortions, and are under no circumstances to be trusted, since they are the tools evil conservatives use to go after good people. That there could genuinely be information on a case they do not immediately know is laughable. That would imply there is something outside themselves.

These are your Social Justice Warriors. But I take umbrage with the name. “Social” is a minx and will associate herself with any ratbag movement or product. “Warriors” is undoubtedly accurate, as they have reduced society to a cultural war. But it is unfair to associate “Justice” with a cause motivated by such supreme narcissism.

Justice is what women oppressed under Islam deserve, but no liberal will fight for them. Justice is what perpetrators of crimes deserve whether that means a pardon or a sentence, but SJWs will plead for clemency for a protected group even if that means unjustly dragging a person from a non-protected group through the mud. Justice is what the people of the United States deserve, meaning the removal of unjust laws established by narcissistic control freaks who see no personal consequences in the laws and hence can conceive of no consequences happening. Justice is what people willing to study, work, and improve themselves to exceptional degrees deserve, in the form of not being unfairly punished by an ever-increasing slope of taxation and regulation. But they are being stuck with these things by people unwilling to work, study, and improve themselves to exceptional degrees, who can imagine no way of getting rich except by doing things that would deserve being punished— say, by taxation and regulation.

They do not fight for Social Justice. They fight for the only thing they truly know. Themselves, hampered by all their limitations, but most especially of all these, their ignorance. And on that basis, they will presume to educate you.

I said this was the key to understanding them and implied it was the key to beating them. Now I turn to the recent and unprecedented success of Sad Puppies, and I ask you to consider something in closing, as a hint to how this myopic narcissism will, in time, tear them apart.

These people attacked, reflexively, the slate of authors suggested for the Hugos as being white, male, and conservative. They are none of these things, of course, but the evil twin of the SJWs would have intentionally filtered along all these axis and therefore that must have been what was done.

The idea of independent artistic merit as a litmus literally never crossed their mind, a telling thing in itself. But more to the point, several authors and editors have therefore been caught in the crossfire who were, right up until this, loyal party members. So sad, to be caught up in one of their side’s own little fits. What do they do? They are, let us all recall, good people, but all the other good people are saying, suddenly, and for quite literally no reason at all, that they are bad people because people they’ve quite possibly never met and certainly never associated with said they liked their writing.

It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? This, you see, is how witch-hunts inevitably play out, but the good people could never have admitted they had devolved to a series of witchhunts. Yet in hundreds of such incidents, you might see how the tendency to accuse people because of association will cause collateral damage to their own side.

Some, perhaps all of those caught in the crossfire this time will say their appropriate contrition and try to lay low. Whether it will work in a field still pining for Jimmy Carter’s second term will be interesting to watch. And friends, this is a spectacularly easy and rewarding weapon to wield.

Continue to uphold merit, rather than politics, as a standard for success in all our respective fields, and it is inevitable that yet more of the good people will be caught with bad friends and just as summarily disowned. For a person with enough drive and enough mental resources to become successful, in a host of possible specialties, the fickleness of the crowd will most assuredly become a source of unbearable annoyance. People begin to wonder about the value of friends who will turn on them not because of what they say, but because of what utterly unrelated people say about them. And by just such a mechanic does an ideology eat itself.

So take heart, my friends, and do not be afraid to say art, music, literature and science are good when they actually are so. Though it may seem, in the moment, to be counterproductive, in the end, we win, they lose.