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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Obviously you don't have to do anything, but "reclaim" is probably a misnomer not just here but with respect to almost all the terms. "Faggot," for instance, wasn't "reclaimed," it was just claimed. SJW is in a similar position. So if you worry is just "the term has always had a disparaging connotation" then I wouldn't freak out too much, because lots of "reclaimed" terms only had a history of having been used offensively.

 

I am aware of how terms get claimed/reclaimed but it's shitty, it's used by shitty people for a shitty reason and it's directly from the internet's undying loathing for people who care about shit. Trust me, I'm aware of the frisson between slurs and reclamation. '

 

Edit: I mean, my post was clearly about my own personal feelings about the term, right? Am I missing something here? I don't need to adopt SJW, it sounds terrible and I'm already a feminist

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I've heard people say SJW in person.

 

Do they, like, say all the three words or do they just spell the letters...?

 

It's so hard to imagine for someone outside of the US... :P

 

And, just because it made my day not so long ago:

 

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 In conversational intent, it is similar to the n-word

No, it isn't, not even close. 

It's ridiculous that you would even think that.

 

I don't know how I feel about comparing "sjw" to actual slurs. It'd be like trying to "reclaim" feminazi. Why would you want to? I don't think I've ever heard someone say sjw in person. Its a word used by dumb people on the internet.

 It shouldn't be compared

 

I'm never "reclaiming" SJW when it has always been used as a shitty shorthand way of talking about people who care about social justice, feminist does just fine. I don't feel like calling myself something ridiculous that people use to disparage others in that way.

Concur

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@namman: Quote in context, please.

If people interested in the issues use it for themselves, it doesn't in any way reduce the insult it carries when others use it as a slur.

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I've only ever heard someone complain about "SJWs" out loud in that video where Jeff Gerstmann talks to a GGer. It's a really bizarre thing to hear out loud, especially because the concept of "social justice" is one that's been coming up in Scottish politics. Our First Minister used the term alot before the election in reference to things like poverty, welfare and social services. Every time I heard it I thought "Great, I'm going to have to have a conversation with someone whose only understanding of 'social justice' comes from reddit."

 

For the life of me I can't remember where, but I heard a really pertinent point about how these demeaning names always seem to be coined by one side. Gamergater's aren't called anything stupid like "Woman Hater Paladins", they're called by the name they gave themselves. But part of the way GG operates is making up these classifications for people they disagree with. It's a quick and clumsy way to shove people into categories, and it makes talking to someone who thinks using those categories really frustrating because they're not thinking about individual circumstance, they're comparing everything to their checklist.

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Ess jay double-u is so awkward to say! Why would you say that out loud, with your mouth, into another physically present human being's fleshy ears!

Yeah it's awkward to hear, too! I don't know these people are kind of uhhh. Yeah. It's awkward.

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I don't think so. Gamergate giving up their #1 cardboard enemy concept? Not happening. The SJW is at the very heart of gamergate's 9/11 truther type conspiracy theories. It's been there from the very beginning, with three mentions in Totalbiscuit's kickoff pamphlet alone. In my experience, the SJW is just about the only concept that keeps the gamergate discussions going e.g. in German gaming communities – while on the whole, gamergate perspectives are rather bound to the U.S. political spectrum. The concept of the SJW carries as well as the Jew did in Nazism. In conversational intent, it is similar to the n-word: If people interested in the issues use it for themselves, it doesn't in any way reduce the insult it carries when others use it as a slur.

 

Besides, the whole idea of a Warrior plays into gamergate's war fantasies (literature and film have shown that no war is necessary when aficionados know their shit). That's why I'm using Bard in the meantime. And as to the entirely overused term social justice, it's a bit difficult for the people deceptively waving the flags of video game journalist ethics and free speech to claim that ANOTHER group would be all about the social issue outrage. :mellow:

 

The gamergaters, it bears repeating, are their own SJW.

 

I'm sorry, it was late for me to be posting and I wasn't entirely clear. I'm not saying that "SJW" is going to die out or anything. Like you say, it's at the core of the reactionary group that is #GamerGate and is instrumental to providing it with a common enemy. I'm just suggesting that the very use of the term like this has attenuated it so rapidly that it's going to become ossified as a dog whistle for that small group of people, like a lot of the terminology used by the MRA and anti-Semites, and become meaningless for everyone else. Even on 4chan right now, almost any use of "SJW" on any board that's not one of the core boards is accompanied by a chorus of complaints, the majority or a sizable minority already seeming to recognize that the term has become weak and unimpactful through careless overuse, much like "white knight" had become just a couple of years ago. Given that situation, I don't think it'll be too long before "SJW" becomes the exclusive province of #GamerGate and its affiliates, while the rest of 4chan and Reddit culture moves onto a less worn-out term to convey their hate, since most of them don't depend on "SJW" to give them a coherent communal identity.

 

For the life of me I can't remember where, but I heard a really pertinent point about how these demeaning names always seem to be coined by one side. Gamergater's aren't called anything stupid like "Woman Hater Paladins", they're called by the name they gave themselves. But part of the way GG operates is making up these classifications for people they disagree with. It's a quick and clumsy way to shove people into categories, and it makes talking to someone who thinks using those categories really frustrating because they're not thinking about individual circumstance, they're comparing everything to their checklist.

 

It's probably not where you read it, but George R.R. Martin's final response to Brad Torgensen hit pretty hard on that facet of Sad/Rabid Puppies. The latter started out using SMOF ("secret masters of fandom") to smear their critics as unreasonable elitists, but apparently the acronym had some positive connotations that couldn't be shaken, so they switched to CHORF ("cliquish holier-than-thou obnoxious reactionary fanatics") and mostly lost everyone because that acronym is ridiculous and obvious a purpose-built insult. Martin didn't go so far, but obviously these reactionary groups that are against something that's just a general trend in culture as a whole and therefore don't really have a coherent group of enemies, so they have to invent them by naming them, and somehow it's always some absurd acronym that is too toxic or silly to ever be self-applied.

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I've only ever heard someone complain about "SJWs" out loud in that video where Jeff Gerstmann talks to a GGer. It's a really bizarre thing to hear out loud, especially because the concept of "social justice" is one that's been coming up in Scottish politics. Our First Minister used the term alot before the election in reference to things like poverty, welfare and social services. Every time I heard it I thought "Great, I'm going to have to have a conversation with someone whose only understanding of 'social justice' comes from reddit."

 

This may not be particularly relevant, but I strongly associate "social justice" being used pejoratively with Glenn Beck (2010). He used to harp on it as a concept, and I always thought it was a weird choice of phrase to demonize: "Wait, are we against justice now?"

 

So I always figured that Beck probably popularized it in Breitbart / Stormfront sorts of online communities, and that ultimately that's the usage that GamerGate eventually picked up.

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And likewise, there should be room for someone with a good reputation around here to be allowed to make a random, innocent observation without people trying to read between the lines and call them out. I don't see how it is in any way productive for us to have a page and a half of arguing about the deeper implications of a post like that.

I know this is a page old, but I thought it worth commenting on. I think this comment relates to an obstacle probably most of us (myself certainly included) face when it comes to handling criticism: we find it very hard not to see it as a criticism of character. I think it's entirely possible to say "hey, maybe that isn't an entirely appropriate thing to say" without it having any bearing on your opinion of the speaker, or your interpretation of their intent. Like, I've Internet-known Miffy for a pretty long time now, and have no doubts about him as a person, and taken in isolation his comment is perfectly innocuous, but I also think that in the context of how women and more specifically Anita Sarkeesian are talked and thought about, it was perhaps a little ill-judged. By no means a big deal, but shouldn't we be able to give our friends a friendly nudge to help us see what we ourselves have missed?

It is a weirdly difficult thing to let go of, though. I'm forever impulsively rejecting things that aren't even directed at me, just because I think it might in some small way apply to me. But when I remember to, I do try to reassess things as they pertain to my actions and choices, rather than as something that condemns my very nature.

Anyway, sorry if I'm dragging this out more than anyone can bear. I just think that sometimes the reason that these small issues get so out of control is that we feel like we're being judged, when I don't think that really needs to be the case. I hope Miffy doesn't feel judged.

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I think SJW and terms like it, regardless of their meaning just get appropriated by reactionary groups so they can be turned into insults. They also tend to get compounded with other words to emphasize the speaker's distaste. I don't know for sure but it seems to be a product of the internet echo chamber that doesn't really have any meaning outside of a particular circle, or has an entirely different meaning outside of those specific circumstances. I hear things like libtard, contard, cuckservative, RINO (Republican in name only), feminidiot, or even simply the words/Acronyms that represent a concept like feminist, SJW, liberal, etc more often used as a way to pilory your opponents more so than a term used for it's meaning. I don't know if it's worth it to try and discover the meaning in a term used in this way, quite simply because there isn't one.

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"Sjw" was never something people called themselves though. It was always an insult. No one called themselves feminazis.

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"Sjw" was never something people called themselves though. It was always an insult. No one called themselves feminazis.

 

Yeah that's true, my point was mainly that typically labels are combined with insult words, then are eventually just replaced by the word itself as the insult.  For example Feminazi and libtard used to be popular insults a couple conservative friends of mine would throw around, but now they tend to use feminist and liberal in the exact same manner.  I think the more extreme groups tend to hang onto the words designed to be insults, but for the more moderate? crowd the phrase itself becomes an insult.

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but it was also legitamitely used usefully to talk about people who think white people having afros is cultural appropriation and racist. 

 

So you mean, the idea that there's some contingent of social justice loonies who are laughably wrong? Because I think this, mostly because I've done quite a bit of reading from black feminists who talk about how adopting black hair styles is pretty callous given the racial politics surrounding black hair and what kind of hairstyles black people are not allowed to wear publicly lest they be considered unprofessional. Same goes for white people adopting "dreads" as well. I'm the radical social justice warrior you want to complain about, right in your midst!

 

The problem is when you segment off a portion of people who "too into" shit to make yourself look more "with it" you push the middle on any sort of social justice conversation. I would love to drop TERFs and really annoying fellow white feminists out of the "feminist club" but that's a little too "no true scotsman" for me. People really want to get rid of people that make them feel embarrassed but it also inspires them to feel more "right/correct" about their own views versus trying to reform the movement in general. 

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"Sjw" was never something people called themselves though. It was always an insult. No one called themselves feminazis.

 

This is the most important point, in my opinion. Before GamerGate was ever a thing, I would commonly see false dichotomies created between "SJWs and MRAs," and then consequently see it pointed out that such a premise was inherently flawed because "MRA" was a self-identifier and "SJW" was effectively a slur (not a real slur, obviously). It may be occasionally self-identifying now, but I'll still see it turn up in totally different contexts like nothing's ever changed - like when Red Letter Media called Joss Whedon an SJW to dismiss complaints that Jurassic World was sexist recently. That stuck with me because it was a big reminder outside of the realm of video games that people haven't changed in their ability to cast off inconvenient politics as "Oh, those silly SJWs."

 

I know it's really hard to believe, being completely sincere, because gamergaters absolutely destroyed that term. It was in bad shape when they took it anyway, it was still used by terrible people arbritrarily, but it was also legitamitely used usefully to talk about people who think white people having afros is cultural appropriation and racist. To be honest, I think "SJW" was always destined to end up an empty term like it is now, but GamerGate definitely solidified and sped up the process.

 

It honestly doesn't sound like you were using the term any differently than GamerGate, MRAs, or TumblrInAction still does. If you consider yourself a feminist or an ally or whatever but still found yourself laughing about the most radical SJWs to your fellow progressives, you were probably just being suckered by deliberately caricatured straw feminists from other sources. As above with the cultural appropriation of afros, there are usually perfectly valid reasons for the most clickbait "This woman wants to KILL ALL MEN!" headlines that MRAs like to come up with, if you bother to educate yourself.

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Commended for linking to to Kate Beaton. Who makes another important point in her commentary: Strong female characters aren't necessarily feminist
 
The false SJW-MRA dichotomy is something I encountered fairly recently: 
 

Added into this whole drama shitstorm is a cadre of SJW types and whoever it is that is opposed to that, MRAs? I don't even know the terminology at this point and frankly I don't fucking care.

 
Clearly establish dichotomy and disdain, add a few question marks for show, profess lack of knowledge, profess lack of interest but walk away with pointed finger... yes, of course, you know whose rhetoric that is.
 
 

Even on 4chan right now, almost any use of "SJW" on any board that's not one of the core boards is accompanied by a chorus of complaints, the majority or a sizable minority already seeming to recognize that the term has become weak and unimpactful through careless overuse, much like "white knight" had become just a couple of years ago. Given that situation, I don't think it'll be too long before "SJW" becomes the exclusive province of #GamerGate and its affiliates, while the rest of 4chan and Reddit culture moves onto a less worn-out term to convey their hate, since most of them don't depend on "SJW" to give them a coherent communal identity.

 
An interesting theory. Eventually, you'd be able to identify gater culture by their slur. However, I saw strong occurrences of SJWT/SJWT rhetorics ("SJW this, SJW that", basically tirades about the cultural infiltration with SJW and the losses our media suffers through their influence) during the Sad Puppy Hugo hijacking. Which is either due to the prevalence of this vocabulary in related cultural suicides... or possibly due to gamergaters 'helping out' the puppies.

 

Kudos to Irene Gallo for describing this occurrence in fitting words, by the way. I have the highest respect for that lady, because she's obviously not just spectacular at her job.

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I think SJW became popular at about the same moment white knight started to wane in usage for whatever reason. At least that's how it felt to me. A new "ironic" label for people who care about women on the internet.

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Moving back to whether this thread should exist still...I like it. It's one of those threads I don't post in but like to read. I wouldn't know where else to get information like this, and appreciate all the links posted. 

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Yes, of course this thread 'should exist'. It's about a cultural phenomenon that has not ceased to exist yet.

 

By name, of course, this thread is about one of the smoke screens of a certain movement that is dying down right now. But as we've established previously, the movement had formed way before it was named on August 28th, 2014, and the underlying problem was present years before August 16th, 2014 set its panties on fire. 

 

The movement will survive longer than the hashtag, the problem will survive for decades to come. So...

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