0. Introduction
Two ongoing events at the time of this writing uncover the problems with social justice. Specifically, they are good examples for why social justice causes feuds rather than change. Social justice is an important tool for everyone unsatisfied with the status quo but its underlying foundation is intrinsically questionable, and its ability to maintain itself in the face of questions rests upon the willingness to reject such questions as improper, not to answer them.
1. Social Justice
The corner of the internet where people talk a lot is littered with social justice, social justice warriors, feminists, MRAs, racists, and trolls. Social justice, rather broadly, is simply the notion of people struggling to create a social context in which they can flourish as people. Like “feminism” being “the radical notion that women are people,” it sounds great. Who could argue? I cannot. You cannot. And that’s the point. It’s such a broad statement that is so innocuous that it is impossible to disagree. But this is a very big warning sign, for where there is no disagreement possible there is no agreement possible. Right and wrong, agreement and disagreement play no part in this game.
Instead, you have to look at what happens when people clamor for social justice.
2. Ferguson
A young black man was shot dead by police. If you were unaware, people will be happy to fill you in that this happens unreasonably often. They say. Why would you question this, though? Do you really think people would lie about blacks getting shot by the police?
Ask the question: unreasonably often, compared to what? What is a reasonable rate of people getting shot by police? When someone implies a measure, ask for the ruler. Do not go down the rabbit hole. Ask for the ruler, though, and you’ll find that, well, there’s really no statistics here. Law enforcement is not required to generally record their own use of force. Law enforcement is not required to generally record the crimes undercover officers commit. You can say what you want about the merits of this, I don’t care, I’m immune to that argument because the point is: you’ve still got to talk about this. You can’t let people dictate a narrative just because there are no statistics. Demand the statistics.
The simple question here is: how would we know what to change if we don’t have the statistics? Should we kill more whites and latinos and asians and inuit, or fewer? Maybe twice the whites and ten times the inuit? I don’t know. Do you? —And don’t let yourself tweak the goalposts and claim, “Cops should be killing fewer persons, period!” And fewer persons should commit crimes; yet, they don’t, here we are, we have to deal with what’s really happening and find the way to walk from point A to point B. And if we don’t even know where we stand, no path can be drawn, didn’t you watch Stargate? We don’t have good statistics on police force and therefore we cannot know at all whether police force is generally used appropriately, for various definitions of “appropriate.” I mean, I will give you a lot of freedom in setting a standard for appropriate levels of violence because it doesn’t matter when there’s nothing to apply the standard to.
The social justice crowd was quick to make this an issue of race. The media (embarrassingly slowly) came to report this. Twitter and tumblr and god knows where else was happy to latch on to this. “Black people are systematically repressed.” But don’t think I didn’t notice the context switch.
When you talk about one person being killed by police, you can make some very specific statements, which might accidentally turn out to be wrong, such as, “He didn’t do anything wrong.” Social justice crowds have been down this a million times before, they always want the message to be bigger so that facts cannot impede the message. It’s not about Mike Brown or Darren Wilson, it’s about systematic oppression—so even if Darren Wilson turns out to have shot this man in cold blood while screaming racial epithets, this doesn’t matter anymore. Right?
No, of course, actually what it means is a one-sided deal. Social justice is about change, not the status quo. Therefore facts which supports the status quo don’t count, because the status quo doesn’t count, and facts which lend support to the changes suggested do count. This perspective, implicit in social justice, is absolutely critical to notice. Maybe I’ll get to relativism some time, but even if you’re a moral absolutist, you absolutely must understand that this is not a sign of hypocrisy. Anti-SJW types are always quick to point out perceived hypocrisy in this one-sided deal but it is wrong-headed and that is why pointing it out never convinces anyone outside of the hugbox. The prior assumption is already that the status quo is wrong: nothing can support it. Do you see?
On the other side, social justice types should also recognize—but don’t—that those who aren’t 100% convinced that the status quo is unequivocally wrong don’t see this one-sided deal as meaningful at all. And I will include in that people who genuinely recognize that “something is wrong” and wish for some kind of tweak. This is the quid pro quo crowd. To paraphrase: “I agree something is off, but what do we do? I have already decided that I don’t want to burn everything to the ground.” They don’t accept the form of the argument.
And what happens is plain as day: social justice types hang their hat on an individual, but the individual is just a symbol, except when facts correspond to the narrative. Example: “Even if he robbed a store, that doesn’t justify the death penalty.” At once furthering the narrative and recognizing the individual. You attack the idea, and they retreat behind the individual. This is seriously deep confusion, but it isn’t hypocrisy.
3. Quinnspiracy
So a scorned lover uploaded some imaged of alleged chat logs which indicate that a video game developer was literally in bed with members of the gaming press and other developers. Anti-SJW types immediately latched on to this story and attempted to spread it. Widespread censorship ensued, which only served to get people who normally wouldn’t even care to start paying attention. People who pretty much sit around and wait for any chance to prove that video game journalists are corrupt jumped in on it, and there’s been three confusing narratives running simultaneously: A) this proves misogyny in gaming; B) this proves corruption in video game journalism; and, C) this proves the power of the SJW camp is way too vast.
Without facts and statistics, we only have opinions and narratives. If you want to destroy a narrative you need data. The problem here is that the people we usually turn to for help in this case—media—are part of the alleged problem. And oh, they were. Reddit moderators and admin engaged in mass censorship. Tumblrs got blown away. A website was shut down. A youtube video was DMCA’d. And finally, when prominent members of the media latched on to the story, they focused on (A) and dismissed this as “personal attacks [on a woman]” and a “dangerous narrative.” The Escapist did it, Forbes did it, even some, uh, blogger(?) loosely attached to Vice did it. And because I have already pointed out the three narratives, you might want to ask yourself the question, “What about the other two?”
This is where the storm gathered power. When (B) was finally addressed, journalists (at least one of them with an actual master’s degree in journalism) said simply, “I checked it out, it’s BS, end of story.” [paraphrased, in case you can’t tell].
No, sir, it isn’t bullshit, cried the gallery. Accusations of impropriety in the media are bad, and it’s been a constant narrative in video game journalism for, oh, ever, they said as they beat down the gate. This is the most recent shitstorm, not the most important shitstorm. And denial of a specific quid pro quo event (the article was written before the alleged affair!) isn’t going to cut it this time.
Did you spot the connection yet?
And the usual SJW crowd was very quick to disrupt the narrative by demanding facts. Prove to me there was a quid pro quo. Prove to me that this was bias. Facts, facts, facts! And isn’t it interesting to note that the SJW crowd didn’t recognize their own tactics in action? This is Social Justice meets Social Justice and it wasn’t the usual suspects controlling the narrative anymore, but they did what anyone does who rejects the idea that the status quo is broken: they asked for proof.
And so it happened that one developer who may or may not be a bad person became a symbol for a spontaneous social justice movement that was opposed to the usual social justice crowd. Everyone who participated in this really needs to start asking themselves questions and not relent until they can give themselves answers.
Except for the journalists, who need to ask themselves very specific questions, like whether they deserve the name, and if so, how they can demonstrate it. They’d better not look to the MSM who were corralled into free speech zones in Ferguson, because that’s already what games journalists are. If they’re not bullied into compliance by Sony, they’re bullied into compliance by Anita, or they’re totally on board with Sony and/or Anita, and substitute whatever company and/or warrior you like in those variables. Right now there simply is no middle ground, the trenches are right next to each other. Journalists can reach out and touch them, and they do.
4. Anonymity
There are no girls on the internet. At first, this was probably statistically true, then a joke, but at this point all that is in the past and this idea is now a sort of anti-SJW idea: “Your questions refer to words, so I have to talk about words.” And ‘being female’ is not a word. It’s not an idea. It cannot possibly add substance to an argument, unless the argument is trivially about the veracity of the statement, in which case, “Post tits or get the fuck out.”
I don’t care if you’re black because being black cannot possibly add to an argument. I don’t care if you’re a woman because being a woman cannot possibly add to an argument. I don’t care if you’re a man because being a man cannot possibly add to an argument. What’s wrong with the police? What’s wrong with video game journalism? These questions do not depend on sex, on gender, or on race. You can tell this because dismissal of an argument on those grounds is fallacious. And the only way you can separate this and make one argument fallicious while the other is not, is with a narrative that begins with rejection of the status quo. Then you can start making one-sided deals, like “I’m a woman and it matters to this case because there’s too many men in gaming.” But don’t expect the entire world to be such a hugbox.
This is why anonymity is such an important force. Even though I don’t know who “halofan32” is, so one could make the claim that it’s still “anonymous,” I want to ask the question, “Then why have a name at all?” If you’re not going to use your real name, then why bother with any name? I have my answer: you want one-sided deals. You have a narrative to push. You need some kind of identity to do this, be it ‘woman’ or ‘trans’ or anything else. This identity is useless for anything else. If you resist this statement, please keep asking yourself questions, like: “Does it really matter that I know this is a continuous conversation with a single person?” Why? —are you going to weaponize their identity against them? “Does it matter if people know I’m X?” Why? —are you an authority? If you are, how can a pseudonym help you broadcast that?
Look, you want to chat with your friends on facebook, that’s one thing. You want to pretend people talking is news on twitter, that’s one thing. But you sign up for a message board like reddit and there is only one reason for your username to be displayed: you want to weaponize your own identity, or you want to weaponize someone else’s against them, or both. And this is why social justice types rarely end up on a site like 4chan, but why they seem to be everywhere else. Social justice is strongly tied to identity politics and you can’t have identity politics without an identity. It isn’t that an anonymous imageboard is against social justice—as I tried to illustrate above, it just happened with the video game drama—it’s that social justice is extremely difficult to maintain without identity.
And social justice absolutely hinges on identity, because people who do this kind of crap don’t want to have to re-establish the brand every time they want to make a point like “There’s too few women in games.” Because then they’d have to deal with the normals who might ask silly questions like, “What is the right number?” That kind of question must be rejected a priori. And identity isn’t quite enough to get you there, so you need to tack on other labels, like subreddits which narrow the context, or “bios” which indicate you’re a feminist and love cats. This way the questions you have already dismissed as improper can be shut out. “I don’t have time to educate you on this.” Is that really it? You lack the time to answer those questions?
But I don’t think you ever answered those questions. Ever.
5. Conclusion
When social justice gets moving, it’s underlying principle is a rejection of the status quo. Implicit in this is the one-sided deal, where facts can only support the movement, not hinder it. But this creates a paradoxical situation where the warriors hang their hat on an individual who stands for the movement yet is not allowed to exist as an individual. The individual becomes a lightning rod for criticism in order to preserve the house. When we find ourselves in these battles, we have to be careful that we remember the questions that are unanswered, because not everyone will be in our hugbox and will want answers. We must be prepared to find that we don’t like our own answers once we give them, if we ask. Refusal to create an identity can give you the freedom to resist this pernicious problem of one-sided deals by discouraging the crafting of an identity, but it is no guarantee you won’t fall into it anyway.
aporeticvoice 