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Author Topic: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory  (Read 5141 times)

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #15 on: October 04, 2021, 06:27:40 PM »
People, generally speaking, are judgmental and like to feel important and superior to others. Social justice warrioring is a perfect outlet for those tendencies.

I believe this is also example of this in action. Before you could be a colonialist or a eugenicist. Now that those theories are unpopular, you need a way to hate large groups of people while at the same time being not-racist. CT scratches that itch.

Zelen

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #16 on: October 04, 2021, 07:32:38 PM »
Zelen, how many actual "agents" do you think there are? i.e. people who know they are agents, rather than people who genuinely believe in the material they are publishing?

This is a false distinction, because the people who are agents (of their employers, who are agents of their employers, etc) certainly believe in the causes they engage in, to the extent that those causes benefit them (economically, socially, sexually, etc). They exist within a hierarchy and the expression of certain beliefs and behaviors is essential to proceeding through that hierarchy.

Nobody needs explicit orders to know that when the King tells a joke, you laugh. If a joke gets told at the King's expense, you don't laugh. High-functioning, high-IQ people like you will find in professional positions take this much further. For example, I doubt that the AP stylebook editors needed anyone to tell them that "birthing person" needed to replace "mother." Yet if they stepped out of line by doing something outrageous like quoting actual scientific papers on Male/Female sex differences they'd get disciplined all the same. Moreover, they know what will get them disciplined, so they don't do it. Meanwhile, explicit rules do pass down from these organs through to lower levels of bureaucracy & corpos.

None of this is new, this is how basically all human structures have always worked, only now it's possible to exert far more influence further and more pervasively, yet with more precision, due to various technological and scientific advancements.

Ratman_tf

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #17 on: October 04, 2021, 08:13:13 PM »
Zelen, how many actual "agents" do you think there are? i.e. people who know they are agents, rather than people who genuinely believe in the material they are publishing?

This is a false distinction, because the people who are agents (of their employers, who are agents of their employers, etc) certainly believe in the causes they engage in, to the extent that those causes benefit them (economically, socially, sexually, etc). They exist within a hierarchy and the expression of certain beliefs and behaviors is essential to proceeding through that hierarchy.

Nobody needs explicit orders to know that when the King tells a joke, you laugh. If a joke gets told at the King's expense, you don't laugh. High-functioning, high-IQ people like you will find in professional positions take this much further. For example, I doubt that the AP stylebook editors needed anyone to tell them that "birthing person" needed to replace "mother." Yet if they stepped out of line by doing something outrageous like quoting actual scientific papers on Male/Female sex differences they'd get disciplined all the same. Moreover, they know what will get them disciplined, so they don't do it. Meanwhile, explicit rules do pass down from these organs through to lower levels of bureaucracy & corpos.

None of this is new, this is how basically all human structures have always worked, only now it's possible to exert far more influence further and more pervasively, yet with more precision, due to various technological and scientific advancements.

I think this is a very important point. Unspoken etiquete and understandings. Seeing social justice activism as a conspiracy with a few masterminds is not a good way to percieve it. It's more like individuals come up with 'social justice-y' ideas and then those ideas disseminate through the communities. Individuals use those social justice-y ideas to apply social pressure on others.
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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #18 on: October 04, 2021, 08:48:16 PM »
This whole mess is actually the antics of an elite that hates white western society. There, somebody had to say it.

Does anyone really believe Black Lives Matter, LBTG, white SJWs, etc. can possibly coexist? No. Too many groups with conflicting grievances. The fighting between TERFs and "transsexuals" is just one part of that.

Years ago, when this had not reached critical mass, none of this was a problem. But now that things are reaching a later stage, infighting must result. White women given jobs in the upper ranks of corporations will NOT like the idea of transsexuals, black women, etc. moving in on their cushy positions.

Leftists failed to take into account that things are a hierarchy, not an equalist utopia. There is less and less room as one moves up through the ranks, so suddenly the "unity" breaks down. For every woman who reaches a higher position, there will be many below her who will be envious and resentful.

So far that elite has been successful in keeping this under control, but doing so requires increasingly drastic and crazy measures.
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Tait Ransom

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #19 on: October 04, 2021, 09:57:19 PM »
People, generally speaking, are judgmental and like to feel important and superior to others. Social justice warrioring is a perfect outlet for those tendencies.

I believe this is also example of this in action. Before you could be a colonialist or a eugenicist. Now that those theories are unpopular, you need a way to hate large groups of people while at the same time being not-racist. CT scratches that itch.

Bingo.  The hate isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.  In fact, it’s the point.

Trond

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #20 on: October 05, 2021, 12:03:07 AM »
I seriously would like to do this experiment; to first put up a Facebook post with this wonderful picture of some Sebei women. My SJW friends love this sort of stuff (context really doesn’t matter). I could write up some gushing platitudes and let the warm fuzziness simmer for a few hours….



…..only to put up this next photo of their “traditional surgeon woman” who performs female genital mutilation, considered an essential part of their culture. I would love to see the heads exploding.



Only problem would be that people who know me would suspect that something was a bit off about that first post 😄

jhkim

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #21 on: October 05, 2021, 02:40:08 AM »
I don't think the spread and influence of critical theory we see is at all coincidental, but rather is intentionally pushed along by elites who seeded it as a convenient justification for diverting attention from their own ambitious (and evil) goals.

Word-usage analysis in propaganda media (NYT, WaPo, Time, etc) shows the Woke language trend in media occurred pretty suddenly during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (& 2011's OWS movement). Someone activated key agents to begin disseminating propaganda.

I think this is a very important point. Unspoken etiquete and understandings. Seeing social justice activism as a conspiracy with a few masterminds is not a good way to percieve it. It's more like individuals come up with 'social justice-y' ideas and then those ideas disseminate through the communities. Individuals use those social justice-y ideas to apply social pressure on others.

It seems to me that these two are in conflict. Zelen is speaking about how the spread was pushed by elites, while Ratman is talking about viral spread of social justice-y ideas.

For what it's worth, I agree more with Ratman.

Ratman_tf

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #22 on: October 05, 2021, 05:35:26 AM »
I don't think the spread and influence of critical theory we see is at all coincidental, but rather is intentionally pushed along by elites who seeded it as a convenient justification for diverting attention from their own ambitious (and evil) goals.

Word-usage analysis in propaganda media (NYT, WaPo, Time, etc) shows the Woke language trend in media occurred pretty suddenly during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis (& 2011's OWS movement). Someone activated key agents to begin disseminating propaganda.

I think this is a very important point. Unspoken etiquete and understandings. Seeing social justice activism as a conspiracy with a few masterminds is not a good way to percieve it. It's more like individuals come up with 'social justice-y' ideas and then those ideas disseminate through the communities. Individuals use those social justice-y ideas to apply social pressure on others.

It seems to me that these two are in conflict. Zelen is speaking about how the spread was pushed by elites, while Ratman is talking about viral spread of social justice-y ideas.

For what it's worth, I agree more with Ratman.

Note my last sentence in that post. I don't think it's an either-or situation. The elites, in this case, pick up those social-justice-y ideas and wield them to their own advantage.

Where I would disagree with Zelen is the ominous sounding statement about "key agents". I think social justice ideology has been simmering for a long time, and the social justice increase in the late 2000's is more due to the ideology being "taught" in colleges, and those graduating students bringing the ideology into the workforce, government and social environment. They simply hit a critical mass around that time.
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Neoplatonist1

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #23 on: October 13, 2021, 01:44:05 PM »
You ever notice that Social Justice as an ideology possesses basic logical incongruities? Why Hollywood needs more Indians but Bollywood doesn't need Chinese people? Stuff like that?
All philosophopies have some logical incongruities, but social justice lacks even the basics of any sort of consistency.
If the people that really believed in it followed its logic, they would be acting a whole lot differently and promoting different things. Like they say they value black people until a black person disagrees and they are just unpersoned as a black person at all?

Thats because its all just cover for the generally more insidous philosophy of critical theory. Its TLDR is:

All of life and history is a horror show. It couldn't have come about as part of just the human condition, or even the nature of the universe. It must have been engineered by the evil people in charge. The system is so intrinsictly corrupt that every aspect of life has been engineered to serve this corrupt version of reality. To participate in any part of the system is to further it.
So destroy the system and everybody that benefits from it until all of reality is perfect.
Its the rapture for staunch materialists effectively.

So whenever a goal of Social Justice doesn't seem to make sense in the persuit of diversity & representation or even somesort of justice, you can generally find a logic to it within the persuit of the destruction of the corrupt ruling society. The reason it rarely creates, mostly destroys, and doesn't see as needing to make any solutions is because it follows a hegalian model that believes that reality is fair and logical at the core. They don't see it as necacary to create a replacement system as they see the natural order (as they imagine it) of things as perfect. So all of perfection will reasert itself once the corruption is gotten rid of.

Sounds like it echoes Rousseau, by denying any form of Original Sin.

Ghostmaker

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #24 on: October 13, 2021, 02:11:26 PM »
You ever notice that Social Justice as an ideology possesses basic logical incongruities? Why Hollywood needs more Indians but Bollywood doesn't need Chinese people? Stuff like that?
All philosophopies have some logical incongruities, but social justice lacks even the basics of any sort of consistency.
If the people that really believed in it followed its logic, they would be acting a whole lot differently and promoting different things. Like they say they value black people until a black person disagrees and they are just unpersoned as a black person at all?

Thats because its all just cover for the generally more insidous philosophy of critical theory. Its TLDR is:

All of life and history is a horror show. It couldn't have come about as part of just the human condition, or even the nature of the universe. It must have been engineered by the evil people in charge. The system is so intrinsictly corrupt that every aspect of life has been engineered to serve this corrupt version of reality. To participate in any part of the system is to further it.
So destroy the system and everybody that benefits from it until all of reality is perfect.
Its the rapture for staunch materialists effectively.

So whenever a goal of Social Justice doesn't seem to make sense in the persuit of diversity & representation or even somesort of justice, you can generally find a logic to it within the persuit of the destruction of the corrupt ruling society. The reason it rarely creates, mostly destroys, and doesn't see as needing to make any solutions is because it follows a hegalian model that believes that reality is fair and logical at the core. They don't see it as necacary to create a replacement system as they see the natural order (as they imagine it) of things as perfect. So all of perfection will reasert itself once the corruption is gotten rid of.

Sounds like it echoes Rousseau, by denying any form of Original Sin.
Which is particularly interesting as current year CRT insists on whiteness and past exploitations (real or imagined) as original sins.

Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #25 on: October 13, 2021, 02:38:51 PM »
Which is particularly interesting as current year CRT insists on whiteness and past exploitations (real or imagined) as original sins.

To frame 'orginal sin' as 'reality/ humans are imperfect and will always be imperfect', they do reject that notion, and to them 'whiteness' (built around that notion) is the only possible sin.

Stephen Tannhauser

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #26 on: October 20, 2021, 12:00:50 PM »
People, generally speaking, are judgmental and like to feel important and superior to others.

What a horrible thing to say! I'm glad I would never descend to such an extreme of nastiness. ;)

To answer the original question more seriously, though, I don't know if "smokescreen" is a fair description for something that was (I think, anyway) always pretty obvious if examined closely enough, and was even openly admitted if the right questions were asked; critical race theory was always one of the motivating philosophies behind most social justice movements.

What torpedoed what coherence the movement had was the introduction of "intersectionality", which is the attempt to reconcile the hierarchy of how Group B can be privileged over Group C but still disadvantaged vs. Group A. The whole phenomenon of "we support people of disadvantaged group X solely up to the point they disagree with our proposed policies" is usually based on the assumption that disagreement with a policy can only be founded in the desire to maintain advantage over a different disadvantaged group farther down on the intersectional hierarchy. This is the source of the recent Trans vs. TERF clash, for example, where feminists defending the unique biological status of women are decried as negating the justice claims of gender-dysphoric men.

One hitherto unmentioned thing which I think has contributed to this, especially post-'60s, is what might be called the "moralization" of politics as a substitute for civic religion, the urge to cast every social issue of politics in terms of a black-and-white irreconcilable conflict rather than a practical matter of reaching compromises about citizen satisfaction. (There is a mordant and brilliant article on The Federalist's website called "Selma Envy" which talks a lot about this phenomenon.)
Better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt. -- Mark Twain

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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: Social Justice is a smokescreen for Critical Theory
« Reply #27 on: October 20, 2021, 12:39:09 PM »
To answer the original question more seriously, though, I don't know if "smokescreen" is a fair description for something that was (I think, anyway) always pretty obvious if examined closely enough, and was even openly admitted if the right questions were asked; critical race theory was always one of the motivating philosophies behind most social justice movements.

I go beyond 'race theory' and just call it critical theory because on a larger scale its just a rejection of EVERYTHING. And you could always suss out the truth if you looked closely, but its like a insect with camoflage. In theory its out in the open, but it depends on you not looking too closely.


Quote
One hitherto unmentioned thing which I think has contributed to this, especially post-'60s, is what might be called the "moralization" of politics as a substitute for civic religion,

I 100% agree on this. Thats why I call it rapture for materialists.