a mixture of genuine ideologues of various kinds ... more moderate people making common cause with the extremists, and people for whom the far-left politics was more attire than actual belief ("some comrades were preoccupied in trying to solve their 'sexual problems' instead of making revolution").
This is a good description of any social movement. As the newest blogpost from SSC rightly states, 'The Ideology Is Not The Movement', and most movements are largely "about" socialization and tribal attitudes as opposed to their ideological focal points. Nevertheless, when discussing what is distinctive about a social movement, particularly in the goals it pursues, ideology starts mattering quite a bit.
It's as if I said, I dunno, that modern physics is lightly disguised Christianity, and when challenged kept pointing out that Newton was very religious.
And in the absence of further evidence, this would be a good default guess. Now, scientists tend to be a pretty diverse mix when it comes to religious attitudes, so we can conclude that modern physics does not have much to do with religion either way, even though historically it did originate in a religious milieu. But current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.
You say they both want a "great cultural revolution" -- but the cultural changes they want are completely different
Are they? Sure, the modern SJWs have their own laundry-list of concerns - mostly derived from the Frankfurt School (which ironically was fairly conservative in its own social outlook - this is why the conspiracy theorists who want to implicate it are quite wrong) and the Marcuse-influenced 'New Left'. Their basic attitude is pretty much the same however - get rid of everything that's 'old' and 'traditional' ("the old ideas, culture, customs, and habits" - the Four Olds) as something per-se linked to "the exploiting classes" (or, more generally, "oppression!") which has "poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years" - and "transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond" to the desired system and worldview. This is not something that conspiracy-theorists wrote about "SJWs", "Cultural Marxism!" or "the Frankfurt School", even though it certainly sounds like it. It's how people actually thought at the time.
The radical leftist students of the late 1960s were by no means all Maoists; being influenced by something is not the same as subscribing to it wholeheartedly ...
This is obviously true, and I'm not suggesting that these movements have steadfastly subscribed to the totality of Maoism. But the influence was nonetheless significant enough to describe them as derivative. And people's opinions can certainly change, but when a late-1960s student activist becomes an academic with SJWish views in the 2000s, this is pretty strong evidence that his opinions have not changed that much.
This is a good description of any social movement.
Which is why I said it's "more or less what you'd expect" :-).
current SJW activism seems to be a lot less like modern physics, and a lot more like, um, Bible study or sermon writing.
In some important respects, yes. But, more specifically, I don't see current SJ activists studying the Little Red Book or preaching sermons about the superiority of rural farmers over urban brain-workers. I don't, that is, see a whole lot of actual Maoism. Which would seem to me to be a relevant thing to look fo...
The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:
3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.
This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.
But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.
The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".
S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.
Making my own inferences, I'd guess that
1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and
2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and
3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.
The 3 reasons are:
1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value
2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us
3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism
Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".
ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:
Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.
Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)
De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.
(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)
The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.
(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)
Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.
Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.