Being a Social Justice Warrior is intentionally uncomfortable, because you’re never outraged enough to solve all of humanity’s problems:
He thinks he’s talking about progressivism versus conservativism, but he isn’t. A conservative happy with his little cabin and occasional hunting excursions, and a progressive happy with her little SoHo flat and occasional poetry slams are psychologically pretty similar. So are a liberal who abandons a cushy life to work as a community organizer in the inner city and fight poverty, and a conservative who abandons a cushy life to serve as an infantryman in Afghanistan to fight terrorism. The distinction Cliff is trying to get at here isn’t left-right. It’s activist versus passivist.
As part of a movement recently deemed postpolitical, I have to admit I fall more on the passivist side of the spectrum — at least this particular conception of it. I talk about politics when they interest me or when I enjoy doing so, and I feel an obligation not to actively make things worse. But I don’t feel like I need to talk nonstop about whatever the designated Issue is until it distresses me and my readers both.
Possibly I just wasn’t designed for politics. I’m actively repulsed by most protests, regardless of cause or alignment, simply because the idea of thousands of enraged people joining together to scream at something — without even considering whether the other side has a point — terrifies and disgusts me. Even hashtag campaigns and other social media protest-substitutes evoke the same feeling of panic.
T. Greer called my attention to this passage:
Five million people participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter campaign. Suppose that solely as a result of this campaign, no currently-serving police officer ever harms an unarmed black person ever again. That’s 100 lives saved per year times let’s say twenty years left in the average officer’s career, for a total of 2000 lives saved, or 1/2500th of a life saved per campaign participant. By coincidence, 1/2500th of a life saved happens to be what you get when you donate $1 to the Against Malaria Foundation. The round-trip bus fare people used to make it to their #BlackLivesMatter protests could have saved ten times as many black lives as the protests themselves, even given completely ridiculous overestimates of the protests’ efficacy.
The moral of the story is that if you feel an obligation to give back to the world, participating in activist politics is one of the worst possible ways to do it.
“Ha ha, look at how stupid religious people are for giving 10% of their income to churches! By the way, you should give 10% of your income to my church.”
Max, wait, what? Where does Scott say that religious people are stupid for tithing? Actually I read him to be citing the religious tradition of tithing as support for the idea that you should aim for giving 10% of your income to charity, whether or not you are religious. I feel compelled to comment on this because Slate Star Codex and Isegoria are two of my favorite blogs, and I was quite fascinated by this post of Scott’s, as well as his follow-up on donating to charity. In particular, I found his analysis of why it seems like the least compelling examples of, e.g. rape accusations or alleged police brutality, wind up being the ones that go viral — they make for more controversy and hence are better to signal one’s allegiance to a viewpoint and against others who disagree. The Michael Brown case gets national attention precisely because it strikes many people as a close call, whereas the Eric Garner case gets much less attention since there is more widespread agreement about it.
Adam, it’s right there in Scott’s post: “about as credible as a televangelist saying that people who want to do good need to give them money to buy a new headquarters”. Clearly implying “not credible at all”, implying that people who believe televangelists are stupid. Of course, televangelists don’t really say that. Scott just assumes that the tithes televangelists ask for in the name of charity are actually going to be used for new headquarters. This assumption may be perfectly true as a matter of fact, but I suspect he is not making it because it is true but because televangelists and their intended audiences are Outgroup. Scott relies on his intended audience, who are almost all Ingroup, to assume that his favorite Ingroup church asking for tithes in the name of charity would never do any such thing. All quite subconscious, of course.
“In particular, I found his analysis of why it seems like the least compelling examples of, e.g. rape accusations or alleged police brutality, wind up being the ones that go viral — they make for more controversy and hence are better to signal one’s allegiance to a viewpoint and against others who disagree.”
Yeah, real compelling reasoning.
Every single campus rape story is a hoax, and every single “angelic black gunned down by racist cop” is a hoax, and yet that’s actually evidence not that the narrative is a lie, but instead evidence that the narrative is actually so true that people have to go out of their way to find bad cases, because those signal affiliation better.
It’s too clever by half and is pure rationalization for a stupid progressive belief system.
Which actually describes about 90% of the content of that blog.