The Pitters' Place

My brother shared this on his Facebook:

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-sh ... st-popular

idk how to react because I hate with a burning passion both the kind of people it's making fun of as well as the kind of people who make fun of that kind of people

The way I interpret it is they're not making fun of those people specifically. They're making fun of a subgroup, which are the ones that exist on an island (the internet) but get swept up into an ocean of arguments while achieving very little in matters of the cause they take up. The article is saying, you support that? Good. Let's do something about it instead of middling away with aggressive non-starters.

It didn't help that it got reposted on Reddit and Voat, though.

The collateral damage sucks; things like mocking the most extreme armchair feminists often end up inevitably mocking feminism in general.

Also I'm perpetually insecure about my brother thinking I'm not cool or world-savvy enough, partly because I think he thinks I'm one of those over-sensitive SJWs, despite my vigorous attempts to prove otherwise. Sometimes I make feminist criticisms of things and he goes "lol", but then at other times he scorns me for uncritically enjoying racist media; sometimes he says I need to stop being so sensitive about homophobic things especially if it's "just a joke" and then at other times he accuses me of being sheltered and oblivious to lower-class problems - he pretty much assumes that, even when my views side with his.

e.g. My father was talking about how the government should do more to help the poorest households, which had recently been identified, because they were a small group and it wouldn't require much increase in taxes. "3000 households," I specified, to show just how few it was, and my brother gave me this dirty look and said "3000 is not very much, you know."

Life is complicated and I don't know how to work out what social justice issues are important and which are trivial and silly, at least according to my brother. I keep getting it wrong, though it seems to be that big stuff (poverty, racism, class issues) are what concern him, though feminism would seem to fit within that too. I just want him to think I'm cool and good enough of a person. Normal people only seem to get these complexes with their parents. I'm the only one I know who has it with a younger sibling.