[Pigo]

It's really funny when people bring up things people said or did 10 years ago as way to knock them down a peg. If anything, it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way. It does bother me that people are expected to behave perfectly their entire lives in order to be a leader. It creates a situation that caters to psychopaths.

[tachyonbeam]

What makes it even worse is that there are always people who will try to put forward the worst possible (mis)interpretation of what you said, ie: in the guise of social "justice", and the domain of what constitutes acceptable discourse (the overton window) is constantly shrinking. There is a fair chance that some of what you posted, which was considered perfectly acceptable and maybe humorous 10 years ago, is now considered toxic / harmful / triggering / misogynistic / oppressive / etc.

Heck, what you say now can put you in trouble today. There are a number of opinions that I hold which I consider to be fairly balanced and mild, but am afraid to discuss online, because I think they could put me at risk. If you upset the online twitter mob, they're not going to fight you with coherent arguments and thoughtful discourse. They're going to insult you, threaten you, publicly shame you, and maybe get you fired from your job.

[adventured]

And further to that point, the way it works for partisans, is that if someone from their side did/said something terrible in the past, then presumably they have learned from it and should be forgiven; if someone on the other side did/said something terrible in the past, then it should still be used against them today. The political landscape in the US today is overflowing with that style of aggressive hypocrisy.

[agumonkey]

To me all this hints at an emerging religion like idea that data is important and of value. I think society is going into quant/science/algo because of a mix of trend, boredom, distress, desire to control and predict more (probably caused by distressing times). And now everybody is scrutinizing every little fact, piece of text, "citing sources"; because many believe it's truer than just babbling around as most of us do.

Side note: after diving into a lot of research topics (as a semi educated newb), I realized that there's a focal point of science, above it you're ignorant, on it you know the mainstream accepted battle tested science of the day, after that you enter another domain of blur where a lot of things are "maybes" including possible refutation of accepted ideas (maybe not in physics, but medical domains for instance).

[andrepd]

I think you may be exaggerating a tad. I think it is hardly a significant phenomenon, people getting fired from their jobs for saying stuff online. As for insults and threats, well that's a consequence of being able to say what you want to people halfway across the word. 99% of people saying mean stuff on social media wouldn't say it to people's faces.

[nasredin]

The attempts to demonize the words "social justice" are quite Orwellian.

"Justice" is literally the last word in America that I thought would be used in some RWA-type context.

[tachyonbeam]

What's Orwellian is being publicly lynched for wrongthink. The far-left is just as authoritarian as the far-right, IMO. The left accuses the right of living in a bubble, but they're completely unaware of their own dogmatic echo chamber.

I'm queer. I'm in favor of universal access to abortion and socialised healthcare, but there are a few things I could say that would quickly get me labelled as right-wing and all sorts of bad things. It used to be that being liberal, being left stood for freedom of speech and the open discussion of ideas.

[fzeroracer]

Ah yes, the ever-famous both sides argument. I always hear this alongside arguments from people using the word Lynch in an incredibly inappropriate context.

[jklinger410]

Are you familiar with how senators name bills in the US? The patriot act, no child left behind, so-on.

If you are against the patriot act, are you against patriotism? If you are against no child left behind, would you prefer to leave children behind?

I suggest you reconsider what end you define as Orwellian.

[gaius]

The attempts to demonize the words "social justice"

How do you feel about despotic regimes that prefix themselves "Democratic"? People have been hiding behind benign-sounding words for a very long time.

[lainga]

Yes, how dare they? I imagine Father Coughlin [0] and the NUSJ are spinning in their graves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

[jstalin]

"Social justice" is the opposite of justice.

[bourgoin]

The term Orwellian is usually used in allusion to the book 1984, in which the official terms for institutions are direct opposites of what they actually are - e.g., the Ministry of Plenty oversees rationing, the Ministry of Truth oversees propaganda, and so on, and in which thoughts are strictly controlled and unapproved, unorthodox ideas are labeled "wrongthink."

You say that the word 'justice' is being used in a Right-Wing Authoritarian (I assume that is what you mean by RWA) context. Here is a definition of RWA from Wikipedia (original source from "The Kinds of Conservatism" by Karen Stenner, Psychology Press 2009): "Right-wing authoritarians are people who have a high degree of willingness to submit to authorities they perceive as established and legitimate, who adhere to societal conventions and norms and who are hostile and punitive in their attitudes towards people who do not adhere to them. They value uniformity and are in favour of using group authority, including coercion, to achieve it."

Merriam-Webster's first definition for 'justice' is "the maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments." Now, that's a bit of a circular definition given that it contains the word 'just' in it, but the 'especially' clause is substantial.

I think that the common objection that people have to 'social justice' types is that they strongly reject those whose ideas do not fall in line with orthodoxy, and are quick to brand anyone who disagrees with them with labels like 'misogynistic', 'Nazi', 'alt-right', etc. The phenomenon of 'outrage mobs' (I find the term 'lynch mob' to be distasteful and inaccurate here) is a common example of this trait. Outspoken supporters of 'social justice' engage passionately in public shaming, in 'no-platforming' (i.e., suppression of free speech), and demand that targets lose their jobs. They seek to punish dissenters outside of the formalized system of justice (the courts; imperfect as their implementation of justice may actually be, they are certainly fairer than the mob rule and/or sovereign edict that they have replaced), and minimize the presumption of innocence before guilt is proven, preferring instead to encourage believing in victims unquestioningly. These tactics seem to be in direct contradiction to our definition of justice: 'the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims,' and sound more like the use of coercion to achieve uniformity.

I think that most people agree that in our society people should have equal access to opportunities, that unfair discrimination is bad, that it is good to help the disenfranchised, and that pervasive systemic injustices exist which should be rectified (reasonable people disagree on the degree to which the government is the entity responsible for implementing remedies, and how it should do so - but that is a separate discussion). Thus, it's difficult to argue against something which on its face bears the name of the concept of justice. Just like it's difficult to argue against something like 'The Patriot Act' which bears the unassailable concept of patriotism in its name, even though in reality it is unpatriotic. Those who oppose 'social justice' and 'political correctness' I think more specifically oppose the policing of discourse and the silencing of dissenters.

Thus, I implore you to reexamine your usage of the term Orwellian and consider that what is Orwellian is not the 'demonization of the words social justice,' but rather the usage of that very term by a group of people whose tactics are decidedly the opposite of justice in practice.

[TorKlingberg]

The problem is that people don't usually switch opinion completely, just moderate them. If 10 years ago you wrote about the proletariat rising up and now you just want universal healthcare, your opponents will still call you a communist.

[gilleain]

Exactly - a decade is a long time; you can be a youth of just 60 years old and make locker room comments about women and furniture shopping that are captured on a hot mike!

People should realise that we mature when we reach 70 and change our opinions :)

[asveikau]

It's hard to tell when something like that is a deeply revealing character flaw that the subject will never turn around, or more along the lines of what you described. I think a lot of people's instincts, perhaps informed by life experience, is to assume the former. How often do you really see people improve on their character flaws?

[dwighttk]

>it should show that a person has the capacity to change and mature if they are no longer acting the embarrassing way.

I mean, it can show that, or it can show that they have gotten better at image cultivation. And the latter is much easier to believe about a person running for office. (I'm not saying that is good.)

[Pigo]

I guess my point was, who is capable of being honest and not being embarrassing at some point? A lot of comments seemed to assume I was talking about Trump, probably because that's all some people know how to talk about. But I'm talking about everyone. The only people who never say or do anything imperfect online have some sort of complex or maybe afraid of being punished by their Scientology buddies. Our brains don't finish developing until we're 26.