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gwillen comments on "3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism" - Less Wrong
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I would just like to note / point out that "SJW" is not a particularly neutral way to refer to the group of people in question -- it smuggles in (at least for some readers, and I suspect for most) a distinctly negative connotation about the group described.
Obviously if that's your intention, then by all means use the language you prefer; but if some of the commenters didn't mean it that way, and are just trying neutrally discuss a movement, I'd encourage picking a different term for it. (I normally say "the social justice movement".)
I will borrow from Error's very apt disclaimer in another comment, and note that my feelings toward the movement in question are more or less neutral -- "an affect borne of opinions that cancel out rather than a simple lack of same."
Perhaps that connotation is because of the group in question? I dislike playing word games, the words we use should be interchangeable if they refer to the exact same thing. It's kind of like how we went from Negroes to Black to African Americans in an attempt to combat racism, but the racism was the problem, not bad words, and it only gets confusing when you word police. I was talking to some social justice types before the term was used in a derogatory way online and they described themselves that way, and the first place I saw it online was as a self-description of those groups. Words get loaded with bad affect because people have negative thoughts about the thing being referred to. I think any decision to use a new word that predates changing the thing to which we are referring is premature.
Or, y'know, because people who call themselves these words do bad things.
I was trying not to kick the bees nest too hard, but I agree with you, doing bad things does tend to make people think bad things about you.
Someone told me yesterday that airline stewards don't want to be called stewards anymore; they want to be called, I think, flight attendants. The funny thing is that "steward" used to mean a very high-ranking individual, the person who ran a great lord's estate. The airline industry used it for their stewardesses to artificially inflate their status. Over time, the role, at least in the opinion of flight attendants, degraded the word, until they didn't want it anymore.
The thing is, there used to be very few airline stewards but a lot of stewardesses. Back in those ancient days when jet travel was an upper-class thing the airline stewardesses were supposed to be pretty girls. And no, I don't think the word "stewardess" implied any high status. Great lord's estate or no, a steward is still a servant (Gondor notwithstanding).
The change to "flight attendant", IMHO, was done to eliminate the gender reference.
How about SJM? I want a noun, not a long noun phrase.
Why did the description change from "civil rights" to "social justice"?
Single Jewish Male
X-D
Social justice is about culture, not just legal rights.
It's the change from second wave feminism to third wave feminism.
Really? I thought it was a self-identified term trying to smuggle in positive connotations, at least among the ingroup. I mean, justice is good, right, and who doesn't want to be a warrior... I don't really know any of those people so I defer, but I tend to prefer the overlapping (but not identical) term "Bigoteer" to strip "SJW"'s -positive- connotation, though the fact I have never wanted to keep a positive connotation exposes my bias.
Hmm, I'd previously thought it was always a pejorative term; now (after checking out Wikipedia) I have the impression that it was originally a positive self-identification, now primarily pejorative in modern usage. So I don't really know what to think about it it anymore.
They've done a really good job of making it a pejorative. Anything's a slur if you hate them enough.