Social Justice is a Good Thing
What race or gender I am or where I was born were accidents of birth, purely up to chance. The best way for me to construct the rules of society is to construct it in a way such that I would feel okay being born with any race, gender, or at any location. That's what fairness and equality means. It's tough to achieve because people understand their own problems better than that of others, and give themselves excuses for their failures while refusing to give the same charity to others. We empathize with people like us.
I think the way to re-frame the situation of somebody lecturing you about how calling people fags is not nice is to think about Colin Kaepernick. He knelt at the US flag during a football game instead of standing at attention with hand over heart. Arguably it's more respectful to kneel than to stand. The conservatives who constantly attacked liberals for being politically correct snowflakes and were scared of being deplatformed by offended college students all of a sudden felt what it was like to be on the other end of that situation. While it's okay for a Mississippi senator to joke about watching a public lynching (of black folk) or how some liberals should be prevented from voting so they can get a more favorable result, it's not okay to kneel in front of a flag in solidarity for black men killed by police officers. Whether or not you agree Kaepernick's opinion on police brutality, it's obvious the aims were noble.
Why can't we just enjoy a football game without politics, some conservatives would ask. Well, the entire patriotic show during NFL games itself was and is a political game. We were scared of the godless commies, so we reacted by trying to be the exact opposite. The idea that people could just forget about politics when they don't feel like it is a perspective born out of privilege. If things are going okay for you, you don't have to worry about things all the time. If your life is a dumpster fire, any time is a good time to try to put the fire out. From the sofa in front of a TV, a white guy might feel annoyed or unreasonably triggered due to their constant hard-on for nationalism, but those people need to remember that it's hell of a lot better to be annoying in front of their big screen TV than to fear the police. There's a remarkable difference in what each side has to give up for this flag-kneeling situation to go their way: Some people have to spend 5 seconds watching a black man kneel, while many other people would be unable to voice their plight.
Anti-SJWs
Sargon of Akkad aka Carl Benjamin comes to mind. (What kind of weirdo names themselves after an old king, anyways?) When being a conservative or a Trumpist seems too shameful, I guess the trendy label now is 'classical liberal'. When all Carl does is praise Trump and ruthlessly attack SJWs and those who oppose Trump, it's not a surprise he attracts a conservative viewership. Oh, but I can't be responsible for my sexist audience! ...Or so he might say. Actually in a way, yes, you are Carl. His viewers have a strong conservative stance on things because Carl constantly makes fun of the other side, while never criticizing "his own side". How many times has Carl attacked Trump?
Yes, extreme political correctness is a problem. But political correctness itself isn't a problem. It exists because it's society way of shaming people with shitty opinions. When Carl told somebody he wouldn't even rape her, it wasn't politically correct. It was bad and he should've felt bad. But he didn't and stood by his statement. This is my point: Too many anti-SJWs aren't well-intentioned people who worry about a stifled public discourse. They're just conservative bullies.
A lot of conservatives put great emphasis on personal agency when in reality free will doesn't even exist. Personal agency is an illusion. We take responsibility for our successes and then give excuses for our failures. I'm rich because I studied hard in college. Oh wait, that ignores the fact that I can even afford college. Or that my personal life is stable enough to allow for that. Or that I was taught soft skills like showing up on time and getting along with people when I was young because my parents taught me those things. Or that I didn't grow up in a world of crime with no real role models.
There is where Carl would say that the solution for black poverty is to be married because married people are better off, as if causation is the same as correlation. Staying married is a sign of stability in life and wealth. Even if getting married is some sort of panacea for the problems which ails the black population, that's not how people make choices. Show me the law which says blacks aren't allowed to marry, he would say. Yeah, well, just because a law doesn't exist permitting racism or sexism that must mean it doesn't exist, right? These people have simple ideas to complex problems and people think they are 'telling it like it is'. No they're not.
Carl's not a centerist. When somebody agrees with almost every conservative position, they are conservative, even if they prefer to call themselves something else to come off as more objective and neutral. The extreme left aren't 'taking over' the left. Carl's a shitty contrarian man-child and a failure of a human being. He's a closet Republican who doesn't even live in America but cares about US politics because he's in a cult of Trump. Other anti-SJWs aren't as bad, but they still defend regressive people while constantly attacking SJWs over and over.
--
Dave Rubin also calls himself a classical liberal and probably feels better about himself for not aligning himself officially to any political party, yet he constantly defends or makes excuses for conservatives and grills liberals for everything. He keeps talking about 'having conversations', ie, talking about talking. But when it comes down to it, he only brings a certain type of person on his show. They're either conservative or people who have serious problems with PC culture.
The problem with people is they won't honestly tell you what they thing, who they align with, and what their motivations are. Dave Rubin is a careerist who had a sudden 180 on politics and went from TYT to PragerU. Carl Benjamin just likes to trigger SJWs (and said as much). Stefan Molyneux went from actual anarchist/libertarian to actual white supremacist who believes in the White Genocide conspiracy. The 'Race Realist' people who support a white ethnostate in America are actually just closet racists. A good example is Lauren Southern traveling to France to record a footage of her walking across an area with many brown people with ominous music in the background. Nothing actually happens in the video. What that means is the problem is there are brown people. Or maybe they don't speak French when talking to other brown people.
The 'free market of ideas' assumes everyone is well-read and open to having their opinions changed. That's rarely the case. When people allow shitty human beings like Nick Fuentes who think trans people should suffer electroshock therapy, gay people should be sterilized, or that white people are superior to non-whites without pushing back on their opinions, all that does is give those terrible ideas a new platform to spread. That's irresponsible.
And the Left is bad at their job. An older generation fought against the brunt of racism, and we just swept the rest under the rug. The election of Trump is a wake-up call because those bigots never left even after we shamed them into silence. They're still there, and they're voting. Oh look, now they're angry and they have Twitter and Youtube. We have to be able to destroy white supremacist talking points. It feels like we not longer know how to do that because we all figured the problem was gone, and now we've forgotten the relevant arguments.
And when idiots like Ben Shapiro repeats that 'facts don't care about your feelings', pundits have to call him out on his shtick: He talks at 100 miles per hour and lists many studies which we couldn't have possibly read ahead of time, but many of his 'facts' and studies aren't true or don't say what he wants them to say. It's actually pretty funny how quickly some of his studies fall apart because he obviously never read them, and he knows most people won't either. They'll just accept him at face value when he says 'this study shows...'.
The pundits also have to call him out on the idea that conservatives are the ones who take facts over feelings, because otherwise the image of a confident man who is good at debating is very attractive to many weak men who follow in kind. Being conservative is often about fear and not wanting change. That's how we get xenophobia, protectionism, and wanting strong national defense. Black people look different from us, so maybe they will give us diseases. Gay sex is disgusting and that feeling of disgust causes me to be against gay marriage. Trans people are different and defy what I am used to and maybe crazy people will exploit bathroom rights to rape others. Those are some pretty emotional ideas based on fear and disgust. It takes a lot of reason and evidence to suggest that the world is safer than ever or the fear of people abusing trans bathroom rights just never came to fruition despite all of the fear-mongering. It's far easier to fall back to our gut instincts which helped us survive a long time ago but cause us to reason miserably.
Blah Blah Blah
The only person I still give the benefit of the doubt to is Joe Rogan, because I've seen enough of his podcasts to know where he's coming from. He talks over and over about how SJWs ruin things or how trans movements are problematic for sports or for children as if it's a massive problem, when the biggest problem in the entire trans issue is the lack of basic human rights trans people have. He just won't have articulate trans people on his show to talk about this issue. If somebody puts 95% of their time talking about sports and children getting hormones too early instead of discrimination trans people face, then you know where their priorities lie.
This is why people get annoyed and say things like 'you're white, you don't get it'. Different people have different lived experiences. While it's possible to understand a situation from both sides through reason and evidence, that requires a lot of mental effort and people generally aren't up for the task. Over half of Americans think society has gone too far in accepting trans people or just right. This is a time where trans people have next to no protections federally and can be fired for being trans, and many attempt suicide due to discrimination and shame. Those people aren't all bigots. They're just ignorant and don't put themselves in other people's shoes. How many trans people are pro trans rights? How many non-trans people are pro trans rights? Lived experience still counts for something.
More Shit Conservatives Say
Rubin's talking about how we don't need building regulations and there's nothing the government does that is better than private enterprise (and backtracking each time he gets pummeled by Joe Rogan on his podcast). It's easy to build shoddy buildings which people won't find out until a major natural disaster, and by then you already earned so much money you might not even care if you get found out. Dave Rubin says that's fine because we have Yelp, and when pushed he said he just liked the idea philosophically of the free market doing everything. How many free market capitalists does it take to change a light bulb? None. The free market will take care of it. We don't live in Dave's free market utopia, but rather the real world where things get complicated and people do stupid things against their own interests thinking they can get away with it. That's why idiots go full autopilot in their Teslas and die and people steal money. Sometimes they do get away with it, because not everyone has the time or expertise to check all the reviews and understand what separates a good from a bad product. Even if Yelp for buildings works out in the long term, I sure as hell don't want to be an early buyer of a house, because those people get screwed.
Jordan Peterson said he didn't sleep for 25 days once after drinking apple cider, and that women wearing makeup is hypocritical because they don't want sexual harassment. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute. Yes, makeup or high heels could be conscious displays of sexuality, but they could very well be nonsexual or unconscious. Maybe I want to put on makeup because prettier people get an easier go at life. As a trans person the idea of looking good to feel good about myself is totally obvious from a female perspective, but is totally foreign to many males. He puts the burden on the women to fix sexual harassment in the workplace, as if men will helplessly harass women if women present a certain way. Because it's unclear exactly what behavior is or isn't allowed, he reasons, women should just not have sexual displays to make it easy. Maybe men should start shaving and stop wearing suits, being handsome, or being funny, or having nice things which demonstrate wealth.
Or you know, let people have personal autonomy. See, this is the problem with Peterson. He makes a bunch of claims about how the world is and never says how to fix it, but he heavily implies how it should be done. He's so slippery. He complains about Bill C16 which was supposed to limit free speech by making it a crime to misgender somebody, when nobody ever got locked up. He complains about the 'postmodern neo-Marxist left' who want to define gender in all sorts of ways, but then he claims all atheists believe in god and comes up with a crazy definition of what god is.
Conclusion
I'm done giving conservative thinkers the benefit of the doubt. Too many of them are dishonest or idiots. I unsubscribed from Dave Rubin and I didn't bother to listen to Rogan's latest podcast with Peterson. If all you do is complain about political correctness and you don't put any energy into attacking racists and homophobes, you're part of the problem.
I've been slowly having these thoughts over the past few years and Destiny on Youtube/Twitch really enunciated what I've been thinking but could not find the words to say.
