The Pitters' Place

My travels through Reddit, IMDb and other places gives me the impression that the US is full of people who are extremely, borderline-murderously angry at feminists/SJWs/political correctness. Are they a majority IRL? Do quarrels like that randomly break out in society? Are those people mostly limited to teenage boys who will grow out of it, or do they span age groups and form the conservative majority? Do most people in the US belong either to that group or to the other angry group for whom the term SJW was first coined before it got hijacked to mean any decent person who cares remotely about equal rights? Is the average person more likely to empathise with them, or is there (hopefully) a greater majority who have never even heard the term SJW and go through life just trying to be decent humans?

Also, what's the logic behind how someone can claim they're not sexist and then proceed to spew the most vile misogyny? What do they think actually-sexist people believe? Likewise with racism - I read some guy who said he wasn't racist, he just believed that the white race was superior. Heck, even the KKK claim they're not racist. How do their brains not implode from the cognitive dissonance?

What measure can one use as a basis to show that it's those people that are in the wrong, given that they're just as strongly convinced of their moral righteousness? Cassius mentioned power/oppression dynamics once, which is a good standard; are there any others? Because there's a huge conservative majority here (by one measure, as of 2014, 78% believe that homosexuality is morally wrong), and the sheer force of their numbers and vocal confidence in their views often makes me doubt my beliefs, and question what reason I have for believing that I know better than all of them, many of whom I otherwise know to be intelligent, decent people who want to do the right thing.

This presidential election has taught me that Internet commenters are not representative of real life. If the Internet had its way Bernie Sanders would have been God-Emperor of the Universe and Hillary Clinton would have been sent to Siberia or something. Instead she beat him by about four million votes, and in the real world only a few more people like Sanders than dislike him. Also if you read the Internet all Sanders voters are going to Trump now instead, while actual polls show 80%+ of them have already lined up behind Clinton. So the Internet is mostly not representative of real life.

Youtube and Reddit, where you see most of this anti-SJW stuff, are used mostly by young white males. Places like Yahoo! and Breitbart and whatnot are used mostly by old white males. Women and minorities, for whatever reason, don't use the Internet, or at least they don't comment very much. Youtube and Reddit I think might actually be primarily teenagers and even pre-teens. Like literal eleven-year-olds.

And I think Internet commenters in general are the worst members of society in any case. Someone asked once why Internet comments are always so reliably horrible, and it was answered that 1) only a small number of people go on the Internet in the first place, 2) only a small number of them actually use social media or read articles or whatever, and 3) only a very small number of them are passionate enough to bother actually making a comment. So you narrow it down and you see that Internet commenters are primarily a bunch of angry passionate ideologues who are such social losers that they actually spend a good chunk of their days arguing about stupid bullshit on the Internet (i.e. me). It's a selection effect.

I mean, what kind of person do you have to be to make a Youtube comment in the first place? Only a person passionate or angry or ideological or extreme enough to bother. Of course they would all be awful and angry, only awful and angry people would make a Youtube comment in the first place. (Of course stooping so low as to comment on a Youtube video is a good sign of boredom and/or depression, and those people often look to get a rise out of people.)

I read some guy who said he wasn't racist, he just believed that the white race was superior. Heck, even the KKK claim they're not racist. How do their brains not implode from the cognitive dissonance?

This is something I've ranted to this board before, I think. Because the word "racist" has zero meaning anymore. It's just treated as a noise. A very sharp, awful, stinging noise. Its fake power - its emotional strength decoupled from any actual meaning - has been purposefully used to disguise the fact that our society is about as racist as it has always been. We can just hide it by making the word racism emotionally stronger and stronger while rendering it with less and less meaning. It's like rape culture - our culture treats "rape" as the darkest most awful thing imaginable, something traumatic committed only by monsters, and it's the one thing you're not allowed to joke about, etc., which serves to cover up the fact that rape as an act is actually pretty tolerated in general society. And then people can point to how "rape" is portrayed by our culture and say, "See! There's no rape culture!" Same thing with racism. "See! Racism is considered really really really bad! We're not racist anymore!" Etc.

I don't really know how to answer your last paragraph. Sorry.

Sorry for the long answer, it's just that your question has been something that's been bothering me for a long time too, and I guess I'm glad I figured it out.

Thanks. Good point about the US elections; I was also surprised at how Clinton had so many supporters when my impression from social media was that almost everybody hated her and were very enthusiastic about Sanders.

YouTube is the worst. I hope very much that it's mostly kids on there and not actual adults, given that typical comments include "EWWW EWW GROSS KILL IT WITH FIRE" on a video about a young boy with Down Syndrome.

For the last part, I've been thinking of how liberal ideology seems to be a progression from conservative ideology - most people start off conservative and then progress to more liberal beliefs due to greater experience or knowledge etc, while the opposite happens less commonly. Such that for example everybody probably holds some degree of racist beliefs, but the morally better position is the one that puts in the effort to challenge that racism rather than cede to it. But I'm not sure if this framework works all the time.

Speaking of liberals, I just read a very jargon-filled social-justicey article criticizing Western criticisms of non-Western queer sexualities, particularly in Asia, talking about how it imposed a colonialist framework and tried to force that natural diversity into the rigid modes of Western identity politics. A lot of it made me really uncomfortable, but I thought it was because of my own hangups / class privilege / internalized worship of western culture; then I saw the comments, which were unexpectedly full of queer Asian people calling the article a load of pretentious hypocritical bullshit. Apparently the author is also a straight white cis woman from NYC.

So that got me wondering about my similar reactions to other similar things I've read in the past, and whether right and wrong are always so clear cut; and if some of my irrational anger towards that particular breed of ~SJWs~ may stem from a justifiable place that isn't always down to my own privilege or the identification with it, given how often I'm made to feel guilty and problematic by straight white cis people whom I implicitly assume must know more about social justice than I do, precisely because of that very colonist mindset they're criticizing. The condemnation of white saviours by white people sometimes comes across as trying to save the poor natives from white saviours.

One thing that struck me about the TumblrInAction subreddit (before it got overtaken by MRAs and Stormfronters) was how so many of the regulars complaining about SJWs were minorities in some way - particularly male ones. There were a lot of non-white, working class, disabled and queer/trans men being angry at a group that was predominantly upper-class white cis women, and while some of that was undoubtedly misogyny, there was also that aspect of having been marginalized in ways that were often ignored because they have male privilege, while simultaneously being denied mainstream society's approval - or the full benefits of male privilege - because of their class or race or sexuality. The stereotypical image of an SJW is usually not a gay black man, or a disabled white guy in poverty, for all their claims about giving voices to the voiceless.

And I empathize with that anger; sometimes the spaces I feel most excluded from are those that specifically try to celebrate diversity, because it's a very specific flavour of diversity. Heck, to this day, and despite all the people whining about Hollywood succumbing to the liberal PC agenda, the only world-famous gay Asian male celebrity I know of is George Takei. Who is awesome, but I can name half a dozen famous white lesbians off the top of my head, and probably come up with 20, given some time to think.