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We’ve seen a lot of weird social justice warrior tricks lately . . . in fact, they seem to have gotten even more aggressively off-putting since Gawker started to tank.
More violent, even: we have privilege-screeching rich girls throwing beer bottles at Roosh V. for exercising what’s left of the right to free speech in Canada.
And more disgusting: period-blood art used to be confined to awful modern-art museums, but now we’ve got the outdoor attention whore who ran a marathon with no tampon in. Part of me suspects this little stunt started as a laundry detergent commercial that the sponsor backed out of when they saw just how repulsive the brackish bodily fluids looked on television.
But I don’t think she was as tactically retarded as she was socially retarded: that bloodstained narcissist might very well have squished her way out of having to do a real job forever.
And I think that’s the point.
Social justice warriors, in my conspiracy-theory-inflamed mind, do not actually believe they are saving the world or anyone else. They are trying to save themselves—from a life of cubicle-ratting or marginal freelance work. They are getting attention for themselves in a way which they think (some of them rightly, others wrongly, but they might as well try) will get them a cushier career than they would have enjoyed otherwise.
The Left, after all, is big business, or at least big public teat. Becoming a stand-out member of the SJW crowd can get you ahead in the media, or at least the academic, rat race.
And let me play the devil’s advocate: to what extent can you blame them?
In the past couple of decades the U.S. has lost its manufacturing base to the global economy, its service jobs to immigration, and now we’re even losing tech jobs to H-1B visas.
Most people’s jobs, assuming they can get a job, are increasingly low-paid, humiliating, menial, overworked, useless, crazy-making, insecure, and worst of all, fundamentally useless. The likelihood of finding work that is either meaningful or reasonably lucrative—forget about getting both, silly—is slimmer and slimmer.
Who wouldn’t want to escape a lifetime of account management at an ad agency for clients whose corporate bureaucracies are indistinguishable from the government in their cumbersome sloth?
Who wouldn’t want to quit being Kafka?
Granted, the Twitter riots that SJWs spread in order to destroy people’s lives are reprehensible. But like anyone else, they’re rats on a rat pile, fighting for a scrap of another, deader, rat.
Sure, decent people would rather preserve their dignity and moral integrity than make maroons of themselves to get ahead. And many of us survive on peanuts rather than dirty our hands.
For those of us who live this way, the fact that the SJW rewards system is breaking down provides hours and hours of Schadenfreude. Don’t let the door bruise your flanks on the way out, Gawker staff!
But their behavior is not necessarily an evil mystery. There is a pattern; unless they “suffer” from a personality disorder, people don’t do insane things for absolutely no reason. Sure, college kids work themselves into a groupthink froth with ease. People that age always do, and they tell each other they’re being meaningfully rebellious.
But why is the froth so particularly ridiculous these days? Because the market for “real” jobs—the sort of drone work you get if you haven’t called mass attention to yourself by bleeding down your leg in public—is particularly awful.
The available work is as insecure as it is meaningless. Even if your writing is a disgusting string of bull, any sort of public declamation feels like a more existentially satisfying way to make a living than wasting your days as a bank teller—or at least it’s thus for people who don’t mind bloviating.
Folks on the Left might note my hypocrisy, in that the same principle applies to the Right; they would be correct. It very obviously applies to the mainstream Right—like the Democrats, Republican candidates for public office will say anything to keep from falling back into the vicissitudes of the private sector.
But it’s also true in the Alternative Right; there are dozens of articles and, indeed, entire “writers” which present either caricatures of their own views, or views they don’t even hold, in order to make a splash, get a foothold, and duck the day job. People with no vocation for writing are drawn in everywhere by the fact that no other job gives them a feeling of purpose, much less the glamor which they, as lifelong media-fed creatures, crave.
Perhaps if the available jobs for professional SJWs dry up, as the tremors in the Gawker empire’s foundations indicate they might, then the stream of nonsense and viciousness will slow down.
It would make public discourse more civil, and leave more freedom of speech for the rest of us . . . but then what the heck are we going to do with all these English majors?
Cripes, if we keep importing H-1B indentured servants, we won’t know what to do with our STEM graduates, either. Our only recourse will be, once again, Schadenfreude: when they come for the managers who kept shilling for more immigration. The kids who didn’t go to college won’t be too thrilled about handing over their burger spatulas, though. Ah, it’s a wicked world.
13 Comments
It will be fascinating to see what happens if Trump’s example of standing up to these people catches on like wildfire. Maybe the new norm will become standing up for oneself and throwing it back in their faces instead of cowering and begging for forgiveness. If that becomes the new normal, then a lot of these people’s future job prospects just disappeared.
I have to say that I see a bit of myself in your description of the vapid and wandering starlust caricature of both the rightist and leftist would-be-writers. It isn’t jarring so much as just a confirmation of the mindset people of my age are willingly taking on to try to scratch their way to the top. A mindset that prescribes no personal sacrifice, loyalty, or effort, and sacrifices morality for the sake of simply finding some of that “specialness” everyone told us we had. What I’ve found out ,and they will find out one day, is that real work does indeed set you free.
Also, fuck Gawker. Forever. That shitmill hive of writers is only rivalled by the commentariate in terms of violent lack of self awareness and every issue pointed out in my reply as well as your piece.
Or, how a lifetime of free metabolic energy cannibalizes itself.
Another fine essay. Having recently been asked to relinquish even my cubicle, the No One Need Apply nature of the job market is becoming too familiar. Ironically, the kind of stuff I churn out might well fall in the Make Sure I Never Get a Corporate Job Again pile, but it hasn’t worked out that way, and besides, that’s not Why I Write.
Speaking of which, I must lodge a small objection to the use of Kafka as a symbol of workplace drudgery. More recent scholarship has cast aside the Brod-Schocken manufactured myth of poor, bedraggled Franz. Actually, he held a enviable job for the State Insurance Dept, worked about 4 hours a day, got along swell with this boss, vacationed often, and was paid enough to live a life of trustifarian debauchery. Sure, he lived with his parents … in their MANSION.
See “Kafka, Our Folk Comrade”, here: https://counter-currents.com/2014/07/kafka-our-folk-comrade/
“And more disgusting: period-blood art used to be confined to awful modern-art museums, but now we’ve got the outdoor attention whore who ran a marathon with no tampon in. Part of me suspects this little stunt started as a laundry detergent commercial that the sponsor backed out of when they saw just how repulsive the brackish bodily fluids looked on television.”
No. It was started by 4chan. They trolled feminists with a “free bleeding” hoax, and they ran with it. No matter how ridiculous something is, you can count on feminists falling for it.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/free-bleeding
http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/692999-free-bleeding
As the article is focusing on a certain type of female SJW, I would point out that all this assumes that what women really want is a “good job” in the real world.
I rather tend to see the over-the-top female SJWism as one giant sh*t test; and as with most female sh*t tests, they aren’t conscious of the meaning of it. They are really screaming out against the lack of discipline in society by showing the most ostentatious kinds of undisciplined behavior. In effect, they want to be slapped down and provided authoritative guidance.
Why are they so bizarre?
Easy.
It’s all the Establishment allows so-called radicals these days.
Workers’ Revolution? Not when your bills are being paid by George Soros, the Rockefeller Foundation and corporate funded NGOs.
Rebel against the Establishment? Not when your university womyn’s-black-diversity-multicultic studies complex gives you that cushy job and a platform to indoctrinate new generations of students.
Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, higher states of consciousness? My goodness, doesn’t that lead to daterape? Ungroovy, comrades, Ungroovy.
So what’s left? I know, protest “racism.” Take it to the streets over the shooting of “unarmed teens,” give sanctuary to the “undocumented,” shut down a race realist conference, Mau Mau a professional wrestler or cookbook author into grovelling an apology over remarks made years ago. And all with the support of the mainstream media, academia, the civil rights establishment, and let’s not forget those corporations conducting “diversity” training and maybe even paying your bills.
Noam Chomsky (yeah, Chomsky) has famously commented that media is involved in the manufacture of consent, serving the interests of power. In case the Left hasn’t noticed, the capitalist-military-prison-industrial-infotainment complex is hellbent for leather promoting racial-gender-whatever equality, affirmative action, open borders, the centralization of power at global echelons, and the general dispossession of the White race.
Time for Leftists to get onboard with the program.
This last year’s protests and associated rioting in Ferguson, Baltimore and many more cities in the Homeland were feasible because corporate media promoted the narrative that Mssrs Martin, Brown and etc., were “unarmed teens” offed by a “racist” law enforcement establishment. Enter stage left Black Lives Matter, and another city block goes up in flames, video at eleven while the Department of Justice investigates the local gendarmerie for violating federal diktats over “discrimination.” The result? You undermine local law enforcement (with the feds filling the vacuum); play blacks off against whites (the old ruling class game of divide & conquer); and wreck another middle class town (housing values plummet as homeowners get out of Dodge).
This goes back at least as far as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-60s. Far from being a rebellion against the Establishment, the Movement was supported by the federal government (right up the White House–Ike, JFK, LBJ), the mainstream media, liberal university establishments (i.e., most of them), and even the US armed forces (with paratroopers enforcing integration at bayonet point).
For today’s progressive spectrum the mayhem, whether in Ferguson, on Twitter or at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, is their great big opportunity to repeat the glory days of the 1960s–this time not as tragedy but as farce.
I heard a jewess say on a podcast today that it was a Jewish thing to think “If we can save just one person, we can save the human race.” I think this line of thinking is clearly what is behind the SJW’s worldview.
Actually they are psychopathic Trotskyists & give them a bit of power & they will murder everyone who doesn’t think like them !
I want to make a maroon of myself too.
STEM jobs are not a dime a dozen. You can graduate from a top program and still be passed over for immigrants. I suspect that one goal is to move as many people between countries not just migrants.
I was in workforce planning business and this is clear. The aim is to globalize the “talent market” with a war for talent etc. Diversity is a part of that.
White SJWs are being squeezed out of the coalition.
It’s partly a reaction to that imo.
It’s a shame these excuses for thinking beings have sullied the reputation of “The Left” to the point that those of who remain are seen as little more than a joke. There’s no rule that says you can’t be Left-leaning yet also rational, measured and politically incorrect (or normal, as it used to be called).
This is perhaps my greatest problem with SJW idiots, who I agree with you are mainly in it for the ‘fame’. There is after all very little to argue with the fact that being a bit nicer to people and acting responsibly within a community are decent ideas.
It wont be the immigrants coming for the middle managers who encouraged more immigration.
It will be the ex-spatula wielders …