Social Just and words

[LetterRip]

Interesting discussion on Social Justice and usage of words.

Discusses the idea of the 'bailey and the motte' or as he puts it better strategic equivocation,

By this metaphor, statements like “God is an extremely powerful supernatural being who punishes my enemies” or “The Sky Ox theory and the nuclear furnace theory are equally legitimate” or “Men should not be allowed to participate in discussions about gender” are the bailey – not defensible at all, but if you can manage to hold them you’ve got it made.

Statements like “God is just the order and love in the universe” and “No one perceives reality perfectly directly” and “Men should not interject into safe spaces for women” are the motte – extremely defensible, but useless.

As long as nobody’s challenging you, you spend time in the bailey reaping the rewards of occupying such useful territory. As soon as someone challenges you, you retreat to the impregnable motte and glare at them until they get annoyed and go away. Then you go back to the bailey.

This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.

[...]

There are as many totally innocuous and unobjectionable definitions of “privilege” as there are people in the social justice movement, but they generally share something in common – take them at face value, and the possibility of women sometimes showing privilege toward men is so obvious as to not be worth mentioning.

Yet if anyone mentions it in real life, they are likely to have earned themselves a link to an Explanatory Article. Maybe 18 Reasons Why The Concept Of Female Privilege Is Insane. Or An Open Letter To The Sexists Who Think Female Privilege Is A Thing. Or The Idea Of Female Privilege – It Isn’t Just Wrong, It’s Dangerous. Or the one on how there is no female privilege, just benevolent sexism. Or That Thing You Call Female Privilege Is Actually Just Whiny Male Syndrome. Or Female Privilege Is Victim Blaming, which helpfully points out that people who talk about female privilege “should die in a fire” and begins “we need to talk, and no, not just about the fact that you wear fedoras and have a neck beard.”

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/

[Pete at Home]

This:

I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is entirely about abusing the ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

Religion has its share of hypocritical losers too.  since the current regime has made social justice the current religious establishment, that's where the sanctimonious pimps gather.

[Fenring]

Great read, LR, thanks for the link. I think "motte and bailey doctrine" is in a sense more descriptive of the precise strategy employed than the more general term "kafkatrap", although the former seems to be a special case of the latter. Orwell outlines pretty clearly the premise behind this type of approach to argument, which is the notion that undermining the ability to communicate effectively undermines the ability to think effectively. It is really not that hard to communicate effectively if both parties in a discussion wish to do so. When they can't, it seems to me that the problem most of the time is that one or both of them wants another result. The important question I ask is why someone would want to break down the collective ability to both communicate and think.

[TheDeamon]

Religion has its share of hypocritical losers too.  since the current regime has made social justice the current religious establishment, that's where the sanctimonious pimps gather.

More likely it is this generations "outlet" for its energy in terms of "leaving their mark" past generations explored, waged wars, or built things. While waging war remains an option, the actual kind of warfare that involves killing and actual destruction has progressed to the point that only a small fraction of the population can experience that outlet. Which means their energy is directed at their immediate environment and trying to reshape it into something more to their personal liking without regard for any other considerations.