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Paraphrasing an article by Time Magazine's Joel Stein:
The Internet's personality has changed -- once it was like a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger's. [ Submitter's note: the "Sociopath with Asperger's" comment is not my addition, but a verbatim phrase in the source article ]
The people who relish their online freedom to act under influence of the online disinhibition effect are called "trolls." Trolling is, overtly, a political fight; but it has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men's rights and against immigration. They derisively call their adversaries "social justice warriors" and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weaknesses to gain pity, which allows them to control the leverage of political power.
When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethic and religious minorities, gays -- anyone who might feel vulnerable. The alt-right argues that if you can't handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that's arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet.
The article closes with a description of an exchange between Stein and a detractor. In meeting the detractor in real-life, he was surprised by her lack of bravado, to which she responds, "The Internet is the realm of the coward. These are people who are all sound and no fury."
Stein ruminates in response, "Maybe. But maybe, in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by cubancigar11 on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:42AM
Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs [ibiblio.org] From someone who has more cred as hacker than Mr. Stein and more support for diversity than ban-happy SJWs.
(Score: 0, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:45AM
Sorry, Cuban, I cannot read your link. You used the "SJW" thing, and so all rational people know two things immediately: you are not reliable, and you are probably not really a hacker. More of a hack. Or hackneyed. You should post more here to further damage your credibility.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by cubancigar11 on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:49AM
That's the title of the article. Thanks for letting us know about yourself.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:52AM
How are you defining "SJW?" Do you mean it in its true sense, that being the ridiculous Tumblrinas that invent things to be offended about, or are you another one of those dork--pardon me, *dark* enlightenment types who thinks they invented selfishness and that anyone left of Rand is untermenschen unworthy of life?
(I already know the answer, but I wanna see it right from the jackass's mouth, as it were...).
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:09AM
Leave Cuban alone! He's just like Britanny! Fragile! He does not want to explain himself, he just want to be banned! Then we will all see the violence inherent in the system! Then he can say, "See, I told you! Ban-happy SJWs!" Except, of course, evidently, we cannot ban poor cubancigar. All we can do is mod him down and hope some readers will not read him and spread his shame. Encouraging him to explain more will only end up like the troll in the FA, a normal person, but one with issues, and chemical imbalances, and one who we will have to accept as one of us, and assist on his path to becoming a more normal, more liberal, more justicy person.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:45AM
Just to set the tone, I have modded no one in this thread down. We are all here to help us all be better Soylentils. Let's keep this in mind. Cuban needs our help. Do not retaliate. Cuban needs our love.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:09AM
I suppose I must also await the response. If I know you, my opinion is the other possibility, but I may be proven wrong. Rand may be tangential to the matter. At the very least, you've shown me before that you have some very good positions as concerns men's rights, and I for one haven't helped. Granted that MRAs can be equally wacky as TERFs.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:29AM
If I know him, he'll conveniently disappear and never respond to that little challenge. After all, terms like "SJW" are snarl words, used for their impact on the R-complex rather than the cerebral cortex, and making the user actually *explain* what they mean makes the people watching have to *think,* at which point they realize what kind of memetic conjob was played on them and leave in disgust.
I think what pisses me off the most about people like him is that they genuinely think everyone else is as solipsistic and shortsighted and self-absorbed as they are :/
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:57AM
I knew right from the title, and the TFS, that a critical shortage of warm fuzzies would be present here. I was right :)
This thread need a hug. *HUG*
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:26AM
This thread need a hug. *HUG*
*HUG* back, edIII! Wasn't it that great big SJW Friederich Nietzsche that said: "When you hug a thread, the thread hugs you!" Maybe not. Or only in the Soviet Union. YMMV.
(Score: 5, Informative) by cubancigar11 on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:17AM
So you apparently know me, enough to call me jackass, and expect me to explain myself to you. And I had the bad luck of reading rest of whatever you wrote:
Gee... and you are surprised I leave conversations in the middle.
Rand? Tumblr? The whole world doesn't run around the american fads, you know?
Here is the subject of my original comment: "I will just leave this here" Because I am well aware of language mismatch when a party is married to a "cause". You can't have a civil discussion without an open mind, and I don't see any civility in this discussion.
Here is what ESR has to say about SJW:
There is nothing I can add to whatever that article says.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:53AM
Here is what ESR has to say about SJW:
Oh, fuque it, Cuban! You just doubled down! I cannot read anything where the entry is SJW, and certainly cannot read anything prefaced by Erectile Subperformance Republican! I mean, the man is a sexually harrassing pedophilic coward who has a Patron account! How could you possibly have any idea that quoting ESR would have any cred here at all? The man has not written any code for at least 20 years. He shit his pants after 9/11. And now he is unemployed and seeking socialized medical insurance. Pathetic.
I wish we could ban you, cubancigar, so you could be happy. But this is SoylentNews, we have a different method of dealing with batshit-crazy right-wing nut-jobs. It is not neat, it does take longer, and will require more work on your part. So what was that about White Males? You forgot "Christian". Do we need to call in Runaway to help? You still have not explained what is to be reviled about Social Justice Warriors.
(Score: 4, Touché) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:25PM
The man has not written any code for at least 20 years.
https://github.com/eric-s-raymond [github.com]
Your commitment to truth rivals that of Donald Trump.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:32PM
And what about everything else aris wrote? ESR's checkins are really the least of his complaints.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:07PM
"I won't read anything that challenges my beliefs."
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:52PM
"I won't read anything that challenges my beliefs."
Oh, if only anything that starts with "SJW" could challenge mine, or anyone's, beliefs! So to be clear, this is not a matter of ignorance, it is a surfeit of knowledge, knowledge gained from hard experience. Many times in the past I thought I might find something to challenge beliefs in writing that contained "SJW", but sadly I only got spittle on me from the foaming mouths of a deranged far right. It was like reading Mein Kampf expecting to learn something besides a historical context. Hmm. "Mein Drumpf"?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday August 20 2016, @09:37PM
We need to prepare ourselves for a descent into severe economic depression, neo-fascism and possibly some kind of really nasty world war to the cheers of the stupid.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:49PM
Anyone actually interested in debate wouldn't be using terms designed to shut down debate, like "SJW", from the start.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JNCF on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:48AM
I cannot read your link. You used the "SJW" thing, and so all rational people know two things immediately: you are not reliable, and you are probably not really a hacker.
This is actually an interesting ball of yarn to unravel. Keep in mind that I'm strictly discussing word-use here. The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] cites positive uses of the term "social-justice warrior" going back to 1991, which predates any known derogatory uses that I've seen:
More than 20 years ago, the term was generally used as a neutral or even complimentary describer. Here’s a clip from a 1991 write-up of a Montreal jazz festival, from the Montreal Gazette:
[Quebec guitarist Rene] Lussier will present the world premiere of his ambitious Quebecois mood piece Le Tresor de la Langue, which juxtaposes the spoken word — including sound bites from Charles de Gaulle and Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior Michel Chartrand — with new- music noodlings.
“All of the examples I’ve seen until quite recently are lionizing the person,” Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at the Oxford University Press, said in an interview last month. Because “Social Justice Warrior” is currently only in Oxford Dictionaries — and not in the Oxford English Dictionary itself — lexicographers there haven’t done a full search for its earliest citation. But a cursory search for the phrase turns up several positive uses, spanning from the early ’90s through the early ’00s.
Which raises the question, is "SJW" a different term than "social-justice warrior?" Or is this a term that started with a positive connotation, and only very recently became negative? If the latter, it seems odd to write off a statement based on the use of this term. If the former, merely unabbreviating the phrase would make the statement readable again (or at least nullify your original objection) -- and while I can't find the link now, I'm pretty sure I've seen a "This Is What A SJW Looks Like" shirt which uses the abbreviation itself in a positive manner.
I'm legitimately interested in whether or not this information changes your mind about dismissing statements based on the use of the term alone, ancient chatbot philosopher.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:06AM
Hey, JNCF, (if that is your real login name), only an actual SJW can call another SJW a SJW!! We own the moniker, we take what our enemies call us, stick in our hat, and call it macaroni! With cheese!
But, yes, it would be interesting to know where this first arose. With a colossal lack of evidence, I suspect Brietbart. What with all the new stuff that has come to light, man, it only makes sense. But I could be wrong. We should research this more, so we can help our fellow Soylentils who seem to have been infected. I have heard that "SJW appelation syndrome" can cause microcephaly in otherwise healthy adult males.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Saturday August 20 2016, @10:28AM
words are neither good nor bad, but thinking makes them so...
(with 'thinking' meaning 'it is what our brains do', not 'reasoned logic'...)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Kell on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:11AM
I think there are really two concepts here that are being wrongly conflated. On one hand, there is the person who strives to bring about social equity and change (a laudible goal to many people) - the 'social justice warrior'. On the other hand is the person who uses feminism and race politics as a sort of weapon to promote a political agenda - what I would call an 'identity politics zealot'. There's a Venn diagram: not all SJWs are IPZs and not all IPZs genuinely fight for social justice... in fact, most of them seem hell-bent on promoting a culture of inequity based on historical slights and wrongdoings, real or imagined. IPZs seem to dominate the online discourse, and I think we rarely hear from the "real" SJWs because they're too busy actually doing that things that help build communities.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:59AM
Oh, great! The solution is another TLA? WTF? NNR? Whatever happened to the Anti-social Injustice Quibblers? AIG, opps, AIQ. Suspiciously like al Quaeda, doncha think?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NCommander on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:31AM
The problem is that when you have a label of any type, the loudest tend to create the stereotype of that label, and those stereotypes then get distorted over time. 20 years ago, the definition of what a Republican was is very different that what it is now. The same can be said for SFW, or troll, or even hacker.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Kell on Sunday August 21 2016, @12:21AM
You're perfectly right - this is merely my own internal way of thinking, and not what I'd propose for others. We all label people, consciously or subconsciously. I prefer to consciously separate these two concepts, which others may tacitly not. YMMV.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Saturday August 20 2016, @02:19PM
It hasn't meant that in a very long time. The main reason why SJW is a pejorative is that they live in bubbles. They usually mean well, when they're not actually trolls, but they're so divorced from reality that they're a danger to the republic. They don't respect free speech or equality as it exists and are regularly tilting at windmills and trying to right past wrongs by screwing over people who had nothing to do with it.
I personally think it's rather offensive to lump the anti-immigration people in with the men's rights people as those are two very different groups. In America it's difficult to find a measure by which men aren't behind. And the list is pretty much limited to sexual offenses. Even there, the women seem to be catching up.
But, life expectancy, prison terms, conviction rates, homicide, suicide, work conditions, divorce rates and child care leave are all areas in which women are doing better than men and those are some pretty damn important things and hardly a comprehensive list. Hence why the SJW types have to silence the critics, they haven't got a leg to stand on when it comes to women's rights and as a result their only viable strategy is to silence the opposition before people notice the lies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:52PM
Nice to see the special snowflakes are out in force. I'd hate to think that they would ever be confronted with somebody elses opinion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:53PM
Shut up, Francis!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:57PM
So the ignorant willfully wish to stay ignorant? Interesting, albeit unsurprising, especially considering how many SJWs espouse how ignorant everyone that they disagree with is.
I'm not quite certain how likely it is you're going to respond, but I'm quite sure if you do it's going to be something snarky that proves my point, so please, fire away if you are so inclined.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:53AM
> From someone who has more cred as hacker than Mr. Stein and more support for diversity than ban-happy SJWs.
The simple act of using the tern "SJW" proves otherwise. Like "feminazi", "tree-hugger", "race-traitor, "virtue signaling", "libtard", "cuck" and "self-hating jew"; SJW is a term created for the sole purpose of avoiding engagement with diverse opinions. It is everything the person using the term claims to oppose, turned up to 11.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:05AM
There's an amazing amount of projection in the people who use terms like that too, and what's even more amazing is that they don't see it.
Take the alt-right types who use "cuck." That word is very, very revealing about the psychology of the user. It's a short form of "cuckold," a man who was cheated on by his female partner. Now the rational response to that is "that sucks, you deserve better, dump her lying bitch ass and move on."
But to the people who actually think calling someone "cuck" means anything in political context, what it reveals about the user is a set of Iron-age ideas about everything from personal honor to female sexuality to what it means to be male to their ideas about power and government. I can guarantee you its users are the classic "Authoritarian Follower" stereotype, are likely to be Trump supporters or worse, are probably homophobic (and may or may not be repressing homosexual tendencies themselves), are likely to see women as inferior, and so forth.
They're also projecting like mad. They see *themselves* as having been cuckolded by the supposed right wing, with all the wounding to their masculinity that that implies, and are lashing out, thinking that by accusing someone *else* of being a cuck[old] it will somehow magically wipe away their shame.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:13AM
You're an idiot.
It simply refers to being used.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:47AM
No, I think she has the correct interpretation here. It's a sexually charged term to begin with. Why choose a sexually charged term like that to describe one's political position? It can't be merely a political position.
I first encountered the term cuckold on hypnosis websites. At the time I was attempting to find a way to experience the things that cannabis analogues had helped me experience years before, which had a mentally stabilizing effect, completely the opposite of my erratic shitposts prompted by alcohol. (If I hit submit on this one, whoops I guess who cares.) Hypnosis proved to be a dead end for me. I found one recording that almost, almost, so very almost did it for me. For a moment I was there, but I need to be there for more than a moment.
At any rate, I was curious about just what a hypnotic recording meant to train a man to be a cuckold might comprise, and while I didn't bother to actually listen to one, I was familiar with some of the affirmations from various IRC channels. I gathered it was something very perverse and very weird given my mammalian supremacist beliefs. Around the same time, I read The Cuckoo's Egg [wikipedia.org], a story about one of the first international hacks, and I made the etymological connection.
Suddenly, cute clocks from der Schwarzwald I'd always been fond of took on a whole new, weird meaning I'm not sure even the clockmakers intended.
So fast forward about six years and I find that the term cuckold has become part of the MRA/RWNJ vocabulary. How odd! It doesn't mean simply being used. It means being used to raise another male's offspring, which a bit of a corruption of raising another species' offspring (with delicious possibilities for my conspiracy theories about lizard people), but hey. This implies that a cuckold is genetically dead. The term is deeply intertwined with the stuff different people have posted here about how Muslims are going to out-breed the rest of us.
I wasn't sure if I should bold the tl;dr portion, but it's in the paragraph above.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:51AM
Biiiiingo. The people using the word "cuck" are deeply frightened for their genetic and cultural futures. Would heaven their genes and cultures had more worth preserving!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:33AM
Then you too are an idiot.
It originates from a particular troll on /pol/.
But it has been fascinating witnessing your projections on the issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:48AM
Darn! The first two times didn't work. Try calling someone an idiot again! It's sure to work the next time!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:28AM
Pretty sure it's not gonna work then either :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:41PM
Oh. My. God.
You do realize that the term was in usage way before /pol/ ever existed? I'll admit, my post was an inebriated meandering anecdote. The only origin I will accept that involves /pol/ is its use as a political buzzword. I am not going to go all the way to the library just to get you a proper etymology out of the OED, so you're going to have to settle for Wiktionary [wiktionary.org]:
From Middle English cokolde, cokewold, cockewold, kukwald, kukeweld, from Old French cucuault; a compound of cucu (“cuckoo”) (some varieties of the cuckoo bird lay their eggs in another’s nest) and Old French -auld. Cucu is either a directly derived onomatopoeic derivative of the cuckoo's call, or from Latin cuculus. Latin cuculus is a compound of onomatopoeic cucu (compare Late Latin cucus) and the diminutive suffix -ulus. -auld is from Frankish *-wald (similar suffixes are used in some personal names within other Germanic languages as well; confer English Harold, for instance), a suffixal note of Frankish *wald (“power, mastery, dominion”), from Proto-Germanic *waldą (“might, power, authority”), from *waldaną (“to rule”), from Proto-Indo-European *wal- (“to be strong”). Appears in Middle English in noun form circa 1250 as cokewald. First known use of the verb form is 1589.
cuckold (plural cuckolds)
1. A man married to an unfaithful wife, especially when he is unaware or unaccepting of the fact.
2. A West Indian plectognath fish, Rhinesomus.
3. The cowfish, Acanthostracion quadricornis and allied species.
Boom. Done. You're welcome. It has always, since back in the 13th century day, had a reproductive denotation and a sexual connotation with overtones of sexual domination through trickery. Is that not what's meant? My fucking apologies if people who are using it have no fucking clue what it actually fucking means. I mean, fuck.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:22PM
So fast forward about six years and I find that the term cuckold has become part of the MRA/RWNJ vocabulary. How odd! It doesn't mean simply being used. It means being used to raise another male's offspring, which a bit of a corruption of raising another species' offspring (with delicious possibilities for my conspiracy theories about lizard people), but hey. This implies that a cuckold is genetically dead. The term is deeply intertwined with the stuff different people have posted here about how Muslims are going to out-breed the rest of us.
Yeah, you're getting close. The problem is you're still imagining the word cuck is merely a shortened form of cuckold. It is not; the term has a new history and thus accumulated connotations. As noted by another poster (and as I understand it), its popularity on the internet seems to have increased in reference to so-called cuck porn, which almost always (as I understand it -- I've actually never seen any) has a racial component, i.e., white man abandoned by wife/girlfriend for sexually superior black man.
From there, it was picked up by white-power folks before spreading to broader internet culture, which is what you're seeing.
Basically, the people using the word cuck today are like the people who would have used words like miscegenation in the past. But the folks using cuck don't have vocabularies that big, so they borrow terms from things like internet porn. I doubt half of the people who use the term cuck even understand what cuckold really means.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Sunday August 21 2016, @03:16AM
Hmm… fair enough. I don't think if we're going to create a new term cuck to refer to cuck pr0n we can entirely disregard the etymology. We'd need to add to it, perhaps with the mention of /pol/. Even then, it retains its basic qualities of referring to the reproductive habits of the cuckoo.
*sigh* Your point about their limited vocabularies is the depressing point in the end. They're probably duckspeaking without even having something they're trying to say outside of tribalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:50AM
It simply refers to being used.
Very interesting, and in the long tradition of *nix recursives: if you call someone a "cuck", your are being used by "alt-right" who came up with the term because they were being used! And even worse, they did not have to worry about the provenance of their offspring, since they had never. . . . we'll just leave it there, with cubancigar. God, I hope nothing untoward ensues!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:18AM
It goes further than that. Practically all cuck porn is a white woman getting banged by a black man while her white husband is forced to watch. A shit-ton of people using the term are white nationalists. [ace.mu.nu] Its to the point where it is so popular with the racist crew that anyone using it is painting themselves as a racist, [radixjournal.com] kind of like any one using a swastika in the west is now nazi-suspicious at best.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:55AM
Nope, cuck is used more broadly than that and has become a meme. You just want an excuse to ignore others while feeling morally superior, same as with the term "SJWs", which are real [reddit.com].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:13AM
Perhaps not. My understanding was largely the same because:
A) I don't expose myself to too much of the Internet hate apparently to see it
B) I expose myself to too much of the Internet's porn to see anything other than cuck porn being advertised in the thumbnail previews.
Purely from a stastisical viewpoint, the submitter is correct. The term is more often used to describe black cock pounding middle age white pussy while the small and limpdicked husband waits to snowball her. I can't speak to the White Nationalist overtones asserted, but a definite yes on the porn. Interestingly enough.... there has been a rather large uptick in it since the election really started.
Who wants to bet that Pornhub can tell us that the largest consumers of this porn are in Red states? ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:29AM
Hahaha, fair enough.
Don't forget the wedding dress. That really adds to the scene.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:08AM
That word is very, very revealing about the psychology of the user.
I hope you know that words don't have any inherent meaning and what matters is the intent of the user if you're going to try to examine their psychology for using particular words. Language evolves.
But let's not get into all this fake "psychology" pseudoscience where you try to examine someone's mind over the Internet, alright? Don't pretend to know what others think better than they do, or else it seems to me that you might appear similar to one of those theists who claim that atheists actually believe in god and are just deluding themselves by pretending otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:42PM
> you might appear similar to one of those theists who claim that atheists actually believe in god and are just deluding themselves by pretending otherwise.
I've literally never heard that. And I was born an atheist.
I have heard, on many occasion, the accusation that some atheists have turned their atheism into a religion. And I agree with that. It isn't so much that they uncritically worship not-god, but rather that they are on a crusade to spread their non-belief and can't critically evaluate religion beyond the most narrow definition of "magical sky fairy" when in practice religion has a much more broad and intellectually coherent place in the lives of religious people. I fault the theists who make that accusation for rarely, if ever being able to express it in anything more complex than a sound-bite. But ultimately they have it right - especially for the people who have left a religion for atheism, many have just substituted all the rituals, evangelizing, social identification and self-righteousness for a new set. There is a saying that the most devout are the newly converted, and seems to apply to a significant number of newly converted atheists too.
To bring it back around, I think you've unintentionally discredited your argument with your central example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:46PM
I've literally never heard that.
I have. It's good that you haven't. Some people will literally say that atheists do not exist.
I have heard, on many occasion, the accusation that some atheists have turned their atheism into a religion.
There's no need to stretch the definition of religion so far when all they really want to do is say that they don't like certain things the atheists are doing.
To bring it back around, I think you've unintentionally discredited your argument with your central example.
Nope. Even if my example was wrong, my other arguments would stand on their own merits.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:44AM
> Nope. Even if my example was wrong, my other arguments would stand on their own merits.
What other arguments? That people do not make unintentionally reveal themselves through their word choices and their areas of focus?
Sorry, but that is disproven so frequently it's practically axiomatic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:39AM
What other arguments?
That you can't psychoanalyze every single person who uses a particular term over the Internet. It's fake Internet psychology of the worst kind. Where is your evidence that this is valid at all?
Sorry, but that is disproven so frequently it's practically axiomatic.
By what? Social science?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:46AM
Basically, if you claim that by using term X, that really what's happening in my individual brain is Y, then you need to prove it. If you make that claim about everyone who uses term X, then you're just flat-out bullshitting now. Even the worst pseudoscientists would hesitate to make such a broad claim about the psychology of an entire group of people who are tied together only by the fact that they use a particular term.
If there is actual scientific consensus that this specific tactic laid out in this comment is good practice, please present the studies which you think prove this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:08AM
Your hatred for the right is obvious. It is obvious they are your enemy. I think your love for them does not exist. You will know how far you've gone if you try right now to empathize with them or think of them in any positive way but cannot. Think hard if it is that you just don't want to, or if your demonization of them is truly complete.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:11PM
Uh, Anon...stop and think for a moment: if I had no empathy I wouldn't be able to get into their heads and figure out how they work so easily.
Fact is, this is a very, very human thing they're doing. It's not hard to understand; it's easy, all too easy, and it makes perfect sense if you think like they do. If I really had no empathy i wouldn't be arguing with--or horrified by--people like Uzzard and J-Mo either. The fact is, it's *because* I know how easy it is for people to fall into that kind of thinking and why that I'm up their noses so hard. Think of it like someone dealing with the early stages of a plague: you can feel sorry for the victims, but you have to, absolutely must, keep them quarantined.
You don't know me, so I can't really blame you too much for what you said up above, but it's simply not true. As it is, here in meatspace my problem is NOT being able to turn this off. I've had spooky shit like precognitive flashes and constant, receptive emotion-sensing happening to me since age 4 or 5 (probably before but I don't remember). It runs in the family, too; my father has a weaker version of it, though he never trained it like I did, the result being something that edges dangerously close to psychic abilities...which I personally do not believe exist, and which is making me feel like I imagine an atheist would if God started talking to him.
Is any of this making sense? I'm constantly going out all-guns-blazing on these people because I recognize how very similar we all are and I've seen this pattern over and over and over again throughout history. It never ends well.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday August 23 2016, @04:00PM
I know some people who have uttered the word "cuck" and I can almost guarantee they don't understand any of the background you have provided. Sometimes words are just fun to say to those who only know what it means in its post-political context.
It's one of those words that may actually have been invented by trolls. Not the nouveau-political meaning of "troll", but the older internet meaning of "jerks stirring up trouble". Because your analysis of the word's origins ring true, and somebody has managed to get a bunch of people too uneducated to even have heard of a "cuckold" before to repeat a strange slur with misogynist overtones, probably just to elevate the anger as people like you understand what they are saying even when its users probably don't.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:09AM
Funny your list almost only includes right-wing insults and none from the left-wing, most notably "racist" isn't included. Both sides of our rotten political duopoly will shout down the other with insults and use labels to refuse to discuss anything with the incorrigible other.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:20AM
I try not to sling words like "racist" and "misogynist" unless they're well and truly deserved, both because it reduces their impact when they're most needed and because, frankly, you're right that some lefties have sunk to the right-wing's level and begun to use them to shut down discussion.
That said, I can sense real evil where it appears and will go all-guns-blazing on it when possible. We're out of time; we can't just ignore it and hope it'll go away, and staying entirely civil is in my opinion partial capitulation. Some ideas need to be met with exposure and ridicule.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:22AM
> none from the left-wing, most notably "racist" isn't included.
Because the word racist was not invented for the purpose of avoiding engagement. Whether or not it is mis-applied for that purpose, it is neither the origin nor its most common usage today. But SJW is and has always existed for that sole reason. It is not leftist to correctly label racism as racist.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Aighearach on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:12AM
Even if it wasn't an absurdly blatant pejorative, the whole idea is absurd that social justice is presumptively bad in all forms.
And does their boogeyman of fake-justice warrior even exist as a notable minority component of social justice movements?
Are those really the people who have such success in the fight for justice that they are called warriors for justice?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:25AM
Of course not; it's using the age-old and always-effective tactic of ridicule. I have a hypothesis that an idea which is successfully ridiculed will become an avoidance-stimulus to the lower/primitve part of the brain, regardless of its actual content. This has its place (ridicule is one of my favorite weapons), but it has to be used against genuinely bad ideas, and *it has to be explained in context.*
This is a battle for minds, many minds, all varying degrees of "woke" (or not). Ridicule is like chemical or radiological weapons in that it can create no-go zones in the noosphere, deserved or not. Most people are more emotional than rational, and I am *certainly* not immune to this, having a bad tendency to let the bile flow when well and truly pissed off.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by migz on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:51AM
OPINION
Social Justice seems bad to be, in every form that accepts the label. It assumes that one can right discrimination by discriminating, and using violence to achieve it, that to do so is just. Further it is prefixed by "Social" to add credibility, but in doing so betrays its political agenda.
Personally I value freedom and reject the use of violence to enforce ones views on others. I also believe racism and sexism are stupid. I have personally been the victim of both state sponsored racism, and personal racism. I do not believe it is right for the state to interfere in discrimination.
Social justice also advocates redistribution. I consider this nothing more than theft.
To me social justice seems to be a reformulation of national socialism with the gun pointed in the other direction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:10AM
Social justice also advocates redistribution. I consider this nothing more than theft.
Takes one to know one! We are coming after you. We are coming for your capital gains, Chuck! We are going to tax you, tax your family, tax your little dog, too. After that, if we have any justice left over, we will educate you about what not having freedom is like. It is like not being paid enough to live, having the rent be too damn high, having to choose between medicine and food. Yeah, we are coming for you, so you can see how the other 99% live! Oh, you are not the 1%? Oh, well excuse us! We are coming for you anyway. We will steal what you stole to give it back to those you stole it from. Fair enough? Remember, as Proudhon used to say: "property is theft". And in your case, it is about time you realized that property is force.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:21PM
Tolerance means not tolerating bigotry. All logically valid ideas should be tolerated, but the idea that the amount of melanin in one's skin, one's gender, one's sexual identity or orientation, or the god one worships has anything at all to do with whether or not one is human is not logically valid and people holding these views are, by definition, delusional. Why should anyone tolerate another's delusions when they're clearly quite detached from reality? No matter how much one may disagree, niggers and fags and Muslims are, in fact, human and will always be human, and nothing will ever change that. Bigots should be ridiculed and shunned until they get the help they need and accept reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:17AM
Even if it wasn't an absurdly blatant pejorative, the whole idea is absurd that social justice is presumptively bad in all forms.
Sounds like a straw man. Does the intent of the user of the term not matter at all? Are you just focusing on the words themselves?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:28AM
Sounds like a straw man. Does the intent of the user of the term not matter at all?
No. And, no. Any other questions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @11:35AM
Intent and context don't matter. Got it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @02:27PM
But using the terms "fucking misogynist cis-gendered white male racist transphobic nerd virgin loser shitlord" is perfectly OK and encouraged right? Because mu feelings!
Hello pot, have you met kettle?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @02:32PM
SJW is a term created for the sole purpose of avoiding engagement with diverse opinions. It is everything the person using the term claims to oppose, turned up to 11.
False. "SJW" was created by SJWs. Then they gave it a bad name through their actions and now cry about the consequences.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @06:43AM
> From someone who has more cred as hacker than Mr. Stein
Just what is it about being a hacker that makes someone an expert on sociology or psychology?
Seems to me that at best the two are orthogonal and that in practice being a hacker blinds you to how people (and especially groups of people) work because humans are all analog and fuzzy logic which is the opposite of computer systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:19AM
Seems to me that at best the two are orthogonal and that in practice being a hacker blinds you to how people (and especially groups of people) work because humans are all analog and fuzzy logic which is the opposite of computer systems.
I don't think so, unless someone goes around treating humans like computers. You could probably find people who appear to be like that in some insignificant aspect, but it would just be pure hyperbole.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @01:24PM
> I don't think so, unless someone goes around treating humans like computers.
It isn't about "treating humans like computers" it is about developing an understanding of the human condition. Hacking does nothing to increase that understanding. Unlike, say, being a reporter where your entire job is nothing but reporting on various aspects of the human condition. Practice makes perfect, and hacking provides zero practice.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:52PM
Just what it is about Internet that makes all kind of sociology majors and gender studies majors and English literature majors think they know how and why of internet community?
See, we can go on and on about shredding this article to pieces. The truth is that Mr. Stein is just as much as trolling as it wants to blame its detractors of it. The reality is that trolls using left-wing terminology are just angry that right-wing is just as good at trolling. Is it a coincidence that every dumbass today is having an opinion about trolling or "violence-against-women" or misogyny or white privilege or rape culture or BLM? Do you really think this has got nothing to do with elections? Where do you think all those millions are getting spent? Could it be that sympathetic journalists are being paid to write more about certain topics and being paid to ignore certain other topics?
For example, if you believe this article, men's rights are against gays. Not seeing the flaw in that is pathological condition yet left-wing astroturfing is so strong due to democrats being in power and republicans busy pandering to richest people, that there are several times more people who are against men's rights than people who know what men's rights are demanding. (Hint: they are demanding equal rights for gays.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @11:15PM
> Just what it is about Internet that makes all kind of sociology majors and gender studies majors and English literature majors think they know how and why of internet community?
Just what is it about the Internet that makes all kinds of socially impaired hackers think they know the how and why of human behavior?
Would you trust a sociologist to write a DNS server? No? Then why would you trust a programmer to explain social behavior?
Just because hackers participate in the internet doesn't make them an experts in human behavior on the internet any more than driving a car on a freeway makes someone an expert on road grading, and paving aggregates.