This topic is in essence pertinent only to the United States, and thus you might be asking that why I, not a citizen, but an European, care and why I spend so much time writing blog posts about American politics. Well, I wish I could simply ignore what happens in America, but unfortunately it's not that simple. The United States has an incredible amount of power to influence the rest of the world. And I'm not only talking about the American government and their political decisions, but about all major ideological movements within the country with a very sizeable following and loud voice. It just tends to be that what becomes popular in America tends to want to become popular in Europe (often starting with the United Kingdom) and the rest of the world. If there's some ideological movement happening, like, in Japan, or China, or India, or Brazil, that seldom has any kind of influence or impact anywhere else (except perhaps some neighboring countries that share a close cultural relationship with them). The United States is much more globally influential than that.
That's why I have to care.
Creationism is one practical example. But an even more dangerous example is the neo-Marxist feminist social justice ideology that started within American universities, spread to UK universities, and is now infecting the rest of the world. For example, Australia is now going to not only teach the social justice ideology (boys are privileged, ie. there's something wrong with them and they should feel guilt, false statistics about domestic violence, and so on) to their schoolchildren. On its wake, this same poison is now spreading to Finland as well, of all places. It will be only a matter of time before the same bullshit happens here that has been happening in America and the UK, with ideologues calling for the end of free speech, demanding racial discrimination, and harassing, insulting and discriminating against white men solely because they are white and men. (If it's happening there, it will eventually happen here. I don't see how Finland would be so much different than it won't.)
One thing that irks me quite a lot is that in the United States the conservative party (ie. the Republican Party, ie. the "right") is completely and fully equating the neo-Marxist feminist social justice ideology with liberalism, and the liberal party (ie. the Democratic Party, ie. the "left"). They are using social justice ideology as an ammunition against liberalism, and the entire left side of the political spectrum. Whenever you see a republican activist talking about social justice warriors, they will seldom pass the opportunity to call them "liberals", as if the entire liberal political view were synonymous with the social justice ideology, and thus the conservative side were a better alternative.
The thing is, the feminist social justice ideology is pretty much the opposite of liberalism.
Social justice is highly collectivist (ie. it divides people into groups based on gender, race and sexual orientation, and assigns rights, privileges, responsibilities and guilt onto people, and judge people, based on which such group they belong to, completely regardless of personal merit, achievements, qualifications or content of character) while liberalism is individualist (every person is treated like an individual, disregarding inconsequential things like skin color, and every person has the same rights, privileges, opportunities and responsibilities as everybody else regardless of those superficial characteristics, and every person is treated and judged as an individual, based on personal merit and qualifications, without prejudice).
Social justice seeks to censor, silence, ban and criminalize unwanted opinions, while freedom of speech is sacrosanct to liberalism. Social justice wants to discriminate against people based on gender and race eg. in hiring and in overall treatment, while that's abhorrent in liberalism. Social justice is highly authoritarian, while liberalism is highly egalitarian.
So, in essence, social justice is pretty much the opposite of liberalism, and clashes with it blatantly. Yet republican activists in the United States just love to equate the two and consider them full synonyms, because that gives them ammunition against the opposing party.
The problem with the republican party in the United States is that many of their principles and policies, too, are in complete opposition to my views. They are, generally speaking, very theocratic. They vehemently oppose European-style universal healthcare, and in general don't seem to care much about the poor and needy. They generally oppose environmental laws, which would reduce the amount of pollution. They are an extremely corporatist political party, and in general want to reduce government restrictions placed upon private corporations. In general, they are gun fanatics, and consider the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct, to the absolute extreme. Almost everything that makes European welfare states successful, they vehemently oppose.
For those reasons, among others, I just cannot support said party. Which is why it irks me when they use social justice warriors to attack the better alternative, even though SJWs in no way represent that alternative and are, in fact, pretty much the opposite of it.
You might once again wonder why do I care about the conservative party of the United States. I'm not a citizen, nor do I live there, so why should I care? And here we have to come back to what I wrote at the beginning: Because they, too, can have a great detrimental influence globally. When we are talking about the United States, big ideologies seldom remain local.
Where do you think that, for example, climate change denialism originated? Which group of people is the biggest driving force in this denialism? Where do you think that teaching creationism in schools comes from? And so on and so forth. And when these things become big in the United States, the same poison tends to seep everywhere else. And we are already seeing this happening at some level.
That's why I have to care.
Creationism is one practical example. But an even more dangerous example is the neo-Marxist feminist social justice ideology that started within American universities, spread to UK universities, and is now infecting the rest of the world. For example, Australia is now going to not only teach the social justice ideology (boys are privileged, ie. there's something wrong with them and they should feel guilt, false statistics about domestic violence, and so on) to their schoolchildren. On its wake, this same poison is now spreading to Finland as well, of all places. It will be only a matter of time before the same bullshit happens here that has been happening in America and the UK, with ideologues calling for the end of free speech, demanding racial discrimination, and harassing, insulting and discriminating against white men solely because they are white and men. (If it's happening there, it will eventually happen here. I don't see how Finland would be so much different than it won't.)
One thing that irks me quite a lot is that in the United States the conservative party (ie. the Republican Party, ie. the "right") is completely and fully equating the neo-Marxist feminist social justice ideology with liberalism, and the liberal party (ie. the Democratic Party, ie. the "left"). They are using social justice ideology as an ammunition against liberalism, and the entire left side of the political spectrum. Whenever you see a republican activist talking about social justice warriors, they will seldom pass the opportunity to call them "liberals", as if the entire liberal political view were synonymous with the social justice ideology, and thus the conservative side were a better alternative.
The thing is, the feminist social justice ideology is pretty much the opposite of liberalism.
Social justice is highly collectivist (ie. it divides people into groups based on gender, race and sexual orientation, and assigns rights, privileges, responsibilities and guilt onto people, and judge people, based on which such group they belong to, completely regardless of personal merit, achievements, qualifications or content of character) while liberalism is individualist (every person is treated like an individual, disregarding inconsequential things like skin color, and every person has the same rights, privileges, opportunities and responsibilities as everybody else regardless of those superficial characteristics, and every person is treated and judged as an individual, based on personal merit and qualifications, without prejudice).
Social justice seeks to censor, silence, ban and criminalize unwanted opinions, while freedom of speech is sacrosanct to liberalism. Social justice wants to discriminate against people based on gender and race eg. in hiring and in overall treatment, while that's abhorrent in liberalism. Social justice is highly authoritarian, while liberalism is highly egalitarian.
So, in essence, social justice is pretty much the opposite of liberalism, and clashes with it blatantly. Yet republican activists in the United States just love to equate the two and consider them full synonyms, because that gives them ammunition against the opposing party.
The problem with the republican party in the United States is that many of their principles and policies, too, are in complete opposition to my views. They are, generally speaking, very theocratic. They vehemently oppose European-style universal healthcare, and in general don't seem to care much about the poor and needy. They generally oppose environmental laws, which would reduce the amount of pollution. They are an extremely corporatist political party, and in general want to reduce government restrictions placed upon private corporations. In general, they are gun fanatics, and consider the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct, to the absolute extreme. Almost everything that makes European welfare states successful, they vehemently oppose.
For those reasons, among others, I just cannot support said party. Which is why it irks me when they use social justice warriors to attack the better alternative, even though SJWs in no way represent that alternative and are, in fact, pretty much the opposite of it.
You might once again wonder why do I care about the conservative party of the United States. I'm not a citizen, nor do I live there, so why should I care? And here we have to come back to what I wrote at the beginning: Because they, too, can have a great detrimental influence globally. When we are talking about the United States, big ideologies seldom remain local.
Where do you think that, for example, climate change denialism originated? Which group of people is the biggest driving force in this denialism? Where do you think that teaching creationism in schools comes from? And so on and so forth. And when these things become big in the United States, the same poison tends to seep everywhere else. And we are already seeing this happening at some level.
Comments
Post a Comment